prohibited or hampered in his labour as an educator of infancy, on the
ground that infantile instruction was the field of the female; that one
female with gifts in the direction of state administration, should be
compelled to instruct an infants' school, perhaps without the slightest
gift for so doing, is a running to waste of social life-blood.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is
essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.
And our demand today is that natural conditions, inexorably, but
beneficently, may determine the labours of each individual, and not
artificial restrictions.

As there is no need to legislate that Hindus, being generally supposed to
have a natural incapacity for field sports, shall not betake themselves to
them--for, if they have no capacity, they will fail; and, as in spite of
the Hindus' supposed general incapacity for sport, it is possible for an
individual Hindu to become the noted batsman of his age; so, also, there is
no need to legislate that women should be restricted in her choice of
fields of labour; for the organic incapacity of the individual, if it
exist, will legislate far more powerfully than any artificial, legal, or
social obstruction can do; and it may be that the one individual in ten
thousand who selects a field not generally sought by his fellows will
enrich humanity by the result of an especial genius. Allowing all to start
from the one point in the world of intellectual culture and labour, with
our ancient Mother Nature sitting as umpire, distributing the prizes and
scratching from the lists the incompetent, is all we demand, but we demand
it determinedly. Throw the puppy into the water: if it swims, well; if it
sinks, well; but do not tie a rope round its throat and weight it with a
brick, and then assert its incapacity to keep afloat.