of her young from her own breast, and rearing it, depended, not merely the
welfare, but often the very existence, of her tribe or nation. Where, as
is the case among almost all barbarous peoples, the rate of infant
mortality is high; where the unceasing casualties resulting from war, the
chase, and acts of personal violence tend continually to reduce the number
of adult males; where, surgical knowledge being still in its infancy, most
wounds are fatal; where, above all, recurrent pestilence and famine,
unfailing if of irregular recurrence, decimated the people, it has been all
important that woman should employ her creative power to its very uttermost
limits if the race were not at once to dwindle and die out. "May thy
wife's womb never cease from bearing," is still today the highest
expression of goodwill on the part of a native African chief to his
departing guest. For, not only does the prolific woman in the primitive
state contribute to the wealth and strength of her nation as a whole, but
to that of her own male companion and of her family. Where the social
conditions of life are so simple that, in addition to bearing and suckling
the child, it is reared and nourished through childhood almost entirely
through the labour and care of the mother, requiring no expenditure of
tribal or family wealth on its training or education, its value as an adult
enormously outweighs, both to the state and the male, the trouble and
expense of rearing it, which falls almost entirely on the individual woman
who bears it. The man who has twenty children to become warriors and
labourers is by so much the richer and the more powerful than he who has
but one; while the state whose women are prolific and labour for and rear
their children stands so far insured against destruction. Incessant and
persistent child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and the most
socially esteemed occupation of the primitive woman, equalling fully in
social importance the labour of the man as hunter and warrior.

Even under those conditions of civilisation which have existed in the