That in this direction, and this alone, lay the only possible remedy for
the evils of woman's condition, was a conception apparently grasped by
none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the parasitic
woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left even in her
degradation!)--seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and sensuality to fill
the void left by the lack of honourable activity; accepting lust in the
place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and an unlimited consumption
in the place of production; too enervated at last to care even to produce
offspring, and shrinking from every form of endurance--remains, even to the
present day, the most perfect, and therefore the most appalling, picture of
the parasite female that earth has produced--a picture only less terrible
than it is pathetic.

We recognise that it was inevitable that this womanhood--born it would seem
from its elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and in place thereof
feeding on it--should at last have given birth to a manhood as effete as
itself, and that both should in the end have been swept away before the
march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and could give birth
to men; a folk among whom the woman received on the morning of her
marriage, from the man who was to be her companion through life, no
contemptible trinket to hang about her throat or limbs, but a shield, a
spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, while she bestowed on him in return a
suit of armour, in token that they two were henceforth to be one in toil
and in the facing of danger; that she too should dare with him in war and
suffer with him in peace; and of whom another writer tells us, that their
women not only bore the race and fed it at their breasts without the help
of others' hands, but that they undertook the whole management of house and
lands, leaving the males free for war and chase; of whom Suetonius tells
us, that when Augustus Caesar demanded hostages from a tribe, he took