without being clearly aware of the fact themselves, and without society's
becoming so--the woman who has ceased to rear her own offspring, or who has
ceased to bear offspring at all, and who performs no other productive
social function, yet shields the fact from her own eyes by dwelling on the
fact that she is a woman, in whom the capacity is at least latent. (There
is, indeed, an interesting analogous tendency on the part of the parasitic
male, wherever found, to shield his true condition from his own eyes and
those of the world by playing at the ancient ancestral forms of male
labour. He is almost always found talking loudly of the protection he
affords to helpless females and to society, though he is in truth himself
protected through the exertion of soldiers, policemen, magistrates, and
society generally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword or
other weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption of
militarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degenerate
travesty of the ancient labour of hunting (where, at terrible risk to
himself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with its
meat and defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he finds his
greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation and uselessness
of his existence less obvious to himself and to others than if he passed
his life reclining in an armchair.

On Yorkshire moors today may be seen walls of sod, behind which hide
certain human males, while hard-labouring men are employed from early dawn
in driving birds towards them. As the birds are driven up to him, the
hunter behind his wall raises his deadly weapon, and the bird, which it had
taken so much human labour to rear and provide, falls dead at his feet;
thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter's glory, when, the toils of
the chase over, he returns to his city haunts to record his bag. One might
almost fancy one saw arise from the heathery turf the shade of some ancient
Teutonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposed there, pointing a finger of