scorn at his degenerate descendant, as he leers out from behind the sod
wall. During the the later Roman Empire, Commodus, in the degenerate days
of Rome, at great expense had wild beasts brought from distant lands that
he might have the glory of slaying them in the Roman circus; and medals
representing himself as Hercules slaying the Nemean lion were struck at his
orders. We are not aware that any representation has yet been made in the
region of plastic art of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats
itself--and that also may come. It is to be noted that these hunters are
not youths, but often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty
enjoyments and employments possible to the male in modern life, lie open.)

These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societies laid
the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of parasitism than
the male. And while the accumulation of wealth has always been the
antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effeteness of the male the
final and obvious cause, of the decay of the great dominant races of the
past; yet, between these two has always lain, as a great middle term, the
parasitism of the female, without which the first would have been
inoperative and the last impossible.

Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroy a
nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, and laborious.

The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successive
societies, that it was a possibility for the human male to advance in
physical power and intellectual vigour, while his companion female became
stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours of society beyond
the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has always been negated. It
has ended as would end the experiment of a man seeking to raise a breed of
winning race-horses out of unexercised, short-winded, knock-kneed mares.