professional men, who if their male relations will supply them with a very
limited amount of money without exertion on their part, will become as
completely parasitic and useless as women with untold wealth at their
command.)

The debilitating effect of unlaboured-for wealth lies, then, not in the
nature of any material adjunct to life in itself, but in the power it may
possess of robbing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thus
destroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally, the moral fibre.

In all the civilisations of the past examination will show that almost
invariably it has been the female who has tended first to reach this point,
and we think examination will show that it has almost invariably been from
the woman to the man that enervation and decay have spread.

Why this should be so is obvious. Firstly, it is in the sphere of domestic
labour that slave or hired labour most easily and insidiously penetrates.
The force of blows or hireling gold can far more easily supply labourers as
the preparers of food and clothing, and even as the rearers of children,
than it can supply labourers fitted to be entrusted with the toils of war
and government, which have in the past been the especial sphere of male
toil. The Roman woman had for generations been supplanted in the sphere of
her domestic labours and in the toil of rearing and educating her
offspring, and had long become abjectly parasitic, before the Roman male
had been able to substitute the labour of the hireling and barbarian for
his own, in the army, and in the drudgeries of governmental toil.

Secondly, the female having one all-important though passive function which
cannot be taken from her, and which is peculiarly connected with her own
person, in the act of child-bearing, and her mere sexual attributes being