Every mechanical invention which lessens the necessity for rough,
untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demand upon
woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Already
throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which the
social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use as
beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures as shall
be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of the more
complex duties of modern life. Not, now, merely for many men, but, rather,
for few men, and those few, well born and well instructed, is the modern
demand. And the woman who today merely produces twelve children and
suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society and family, is
regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, and not the
productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult and expensive
has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one
individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the complexities
and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as well as to the
state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already, in most
cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the case of the artisan,
who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must support and train his
children till their twelfth or fourteenth year, if they are ever to become
even skilled manual labourers, and who if his family be large often sinks
beneath the burden, allowing his offspring, untaught and untrained, to
become waste products of human life; or, in that of the professional man,
who by his mental toil is compelled to support and educate, at immense
expense, his sons till they are twenty or older, and to sustain his
daughters, often throughout their whole lives should they not marry, and to
whom a large family proves often no less disastrous; while the state whose
women produce recklessly large masses of individuals in excess of those for
whom they can provide instruction and nourishment is a state, in so far,