deathless fidelity of richly developed man and woman to each other, we find
it not only everywhere, but forming the very groundwork on which is based
sentient existence; never eradicable, though infinitely varied in its
external forms of expression. When we consider that in the human world,
from the battles and dances of savages to the intrigues and entertainments
of modern Courts and palaces, the attraction of man and woman for each
other has played an unending part; and, that the most fierce ascetic
religious enthusiasm through the ages, the flagellations and starvations in
endless nunneries and monasteries, have never been able to extirpate nor
seriously to weaken for one moment the master dominance of this emotion;
that the lowest and most brutal ignorance, and the highest intellectual
culture leave mankind, equally, though in different forms, amenable to its
mastery; that, whether in the brutal guffaw of sex laughter which rings
across the drinking bars of our modern cities, and rises from the
comfortable armchairs in fashionable clubs; or in the poet's dreams, and
the noblest conjugal relations of men and women linked together for life,
it plays still today on earth the vast part it played when hoary monsters
ploughed after each other through Silurian slime, and that still it forms
as ever the warp on which in the loom of human life the web is woven, and
runs as a thread never absent through every design and pattern which
constitutes the individual existence on earth, it appears not merely as
ineradicable; but it is inconceivable to suppose that that attraction of
sex towards sex, which, with hunger and thirst, lie, as the triune
instincts, at the base of animal life on earth, should ever be exterminable
by the comparatively superficial changes resulting from the performance of
this or that form of labour, or the little more or less of knowledge in one
direction or another.

That the female who drives steam-driven looms, producing scores of yards of
linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of her