only to women of the upper classes, the mass of labouring women, who form
the vast bulk of the English women of the present day, being left to their
ill-paid drudgery and their child-bearing as well!

There is some difficulty in replying to a theorist so wholly delusive. Not
only is he to be met by all the arguments against parasitism of class or
race; but, at the present day, when probably much more than half the
world's most laborious and ill-paid labour is still performed by women,
from tea pickers and cocoa tenders in India and the islands, to the
washerwomen, cooks, and drudging labouring men's wives, who in addition to
the sternest and most unending toil, throw in their child-bearing as a
little addition; and when, in some civilised countries women exceed the
males in numbers by one million, so that there would still be one million
females for whom there was no legitimate sexual outlet, though each male in
the nation supported a female, it is somewhat difficult to reply with
gravity to the assertion, "Let Woman be content to be the 'Divine Child-
bearer,' and ask no more."

Were it worth replying gravely to so idle a theorist, we might answer:--
Through all the ages of the past, when, with heavy womb and hard labour-
worn hands, we physically toiled beside man, bearing up by the labour of
our bodies the world about us, it was never suggested to us, "You, the
child-bearers of the race, have in that one function a labour that equals
all others combined; therefore, toil no more in other directions, we pray
of you; neither plant, nor build, nor bend over the grindstone; nor far
into the night, while we sleep, sit weaving the clothing we and our
children are to wear! Leave it to us, to plant, to reap, to weave, to
work, to toil for you, O sacred child-bearer! Work no more; every man of
the race will work for you!" This cry in all the grim ages of our past
toil we never heard.