No, more disastrously! For while the female animal transmits herself to
her descendant only or mainly by means of germinal inheritance, and through
the influence she may exert over it during gestation, the human female, by
producing the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which the early infant
years of life are passed, impresses herself far more indelibly on her
descendants. Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanently produce
an able and labouring manhood; only an effete and inactive male can
ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood. The curled
darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicate apparel, his
devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whose severest labour is
the search after pleasure, and for whom even the chase, which was for his
remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil essential for the meat and
life of his people, becomes a luxurious and farcical amusement;--this male,
whether found in the later Roman Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in
our Northern civilisations, is possible only because generations of
parasitic women have preceded him. More repulsive than the parasite female
herself, because a yet further product of decay, it is yet only the scent
of his mother's boudoir that we smell in his hair. He is like to the bald
patches and rotten wool on the back of a scabby sheep; which indeed
indicate that, deep beneath the surface, a parasite insect is eating its
way into the flesh, but which are not so much the cause of disease, as its
final manifestation.

As we have said it is the power of the human female to impress herself on
her descendants, male and female, not only through germinal inheritance,
through influence during the period of gestation, but above all by
producing the mental atmosphere in which the impressionable infant years of
life are passed, which makes the condition of the child-bearing female one
of paramount interest of the race. It is this fact which causes even
prostitution (in many other respects the most repulsive of all the forms of