of abortion on the mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the
question, whether made from the emotional platform of the moral reformer,
or the intellectual platform of the would-be scientist. We are left with a
feeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that the
knife has not reached the core.)

Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full
development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any
dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece,
Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have
produced the same social disease among wealthy and dominant races; and
again and again when the nation so affected has come into contact with
nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has contributed
to its destruction.

In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood was richly
and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. Not the mass of the
woman alone, but the king's wife and the prince's daughter do we find going
to the well to bear water, cleansing the household linen in the streams,
feeding and doctoring their households, manufacturing the clothing of their
race, and performing even a share of the highest social functions as
priestesses and prophetesses. It was from the bodies of such women as
these that sprang that race of heroes, thinkers, and artists who laid the
foundations of Grecian greatness. These females underlay their society as
the solid and deeply buried foundations underlay the more visible and
ornate portions of a great temple, making its structure and persistence
possible. In Greece, after a certain lapse of time, these virile labouring
women in the upper classes were to be found no more. The accumulated
wealth of the dominant race, gathered through the labour of slaves and
subject people, had so immensely increased that there was no longer a call