on each other through inheritance; or progress is impossible. The truth
that, as the existence of even the male Bushman would be impossible without
the existence of the analogous Bushwoman with the same gifts; and that as
races which can produce among their males a William Kingdon Clifford, a
Tolstoy, or a Robert Browning, would be inconceivable and impossible,
unless among its females it could also produce a Sophia Kovalevsky, a
George Eliot, or a Louise Michel; so, also, in the future, that higher and
more socialised human race we dream of can only come into existence,
because in both the sex forms have evolved together, now this sex and then
that, so to speak, catching up the ball of life and throwing it back to the
other, slightly if imperceptibly enlarging and beautifying it as it passes
through their hands. The fact that without the reaction of interevolution
between the sexes, there can be no real and permanent human advance;
without the enlarged deep-thinking Eve to bear him, no enlarged Adam;
without the enlarged widely sympathising Adam to beget her, no enlarged
widely comprehending Eve; without an enlarged Adam and an enlarged Eve, no
enlarged and beautified generation of mankind on earth; that an arrest in
one form is an arrest in both; and in the upward march of the entire human
family. The truth that, if at the present day, woman, after her long
upward march side by side with man, developing with him through the
countless ages, by means of the endless exercise of the faculties of mind
and body, has now, at last, reached her ultimate limit of growth, and can
progress no farther; that, then, here also, today, the growth of the human
spirit is to be stayed; that here, on the spot of woman's arrest, is the
standard of the race to be finally planted, to move forward no more, for
ever:--that, if the parasite woman on her couch, loaded with gewgaws, the
plaything and amusement of man, be the permanent and final manifestation of
female human life on the globe, then that couch is also the death-bed of
human evolution. These profound underlying truths, perhaps, not one woman
in twenty thousand of those actively engaged in the struggle for