tendency of the movements mentioned is to throw certain classes of women back into the home.  The home of the future, however, will have lost much of the drudgery and monotony once associated with it.  The ingenious labor-saving devices, like the breadmixer, the fireless cooker, the vacuum cleaner, and the electric iron, the propagation of scientific knowledge in the rearing of children, and wider outlets for outside interests, will tend to make domestic life an exact science, a profession as important and attractive as any other.

The home is not necessarily every woman’s sphere and neither is motherhood.  Neither is it every woman’s congenital duty to make herself attractive to men.  The “woman’s pages” of newspapers, filled with gratuitous advice on these subjects, never tell men that their duty is fatherhood or that they should make themselves attractive or that their sphere is also the home.  Until these one-sided points of view are adjusted to a more reasonable basis, we shall not reach an understanding.  They are as unjust as the farmer who ploughs with a steam plow and lets his wife cart water from a distant well instead of providing convenient plumbing.

Women who are fitted for motherhood and have a talent for it can enter it with advantage.  There is a talent for motherhood exactly as there is for other things.  Other women have genius which can be of greatest service to the community in other ways.  They should have opportunity to find their sphere.  If this is “Feminism,” it is also simple justice.  One reason that we are at sea in some of the problems of the women’s-rights movement, is that the history of women has been mainly written by men.  The question of motherhood, the sexual life of women, and the position of women as it has been or is likely to be affected by their sexual characteristics, must be more exactly ascertained before definite conclusions can be reached.  At present there is too much that we don’t know.  We need more scientific investigations of the type of Mr. Havelock Ellis’s admirable Studies in the Psychology of Sex[433] and less of pseudo-scientific lucubrations like Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character.  When human society has rid itself of the bogies and nightmares, superstitions and prejudices, which have borne upon it with crushing force, it will be in a better position to construct an ideal system of government.  Meanwhile experiments are and must be made.  Woman suffrage is not necessarily a reform; it is a necessary step in evolution.

One venerable bogey I wish to dispose of before I close.  It is that the Roman Empire was ruined and collapsed because the increasing liberty given to women and the equality granted the sexes under the Empire produced immorality that destroyed the State.  The trouble with Rome was that it failed to grasp the fundamentals of economic law.  Slavery, the concentration of land in a few hands, and the theory that all taxation has for its end the enriching of