the sum of evil and that of good are about equal.  If, for instance, as regards love, we oppose the visibly licentious conduct of men to the apparent reserve of women, it would be a vain valuation, for the number of faults committed by women with men is necessarily the same as that of men with women.  There exist among us fewer scrupulous men than perfectly honest women, but it is easy to see how the balance is restored.  If this question of the moral preeminence of one sex over the other were not insoluble it would still remain very complicated with reference to the whole of the species, or even the whole of a nation, and any dispute here seems idle.”

This conclusion is in accordance with the general compensatory and complementary relationship of women to men (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, especially pp. 448 et seq.).

In a recent symposium on the question whether women are morally inferior to men, with special reference to aptitude for loyalty (La Revue, Jan. 1, 1909), to which various distinguished French men and women contributed their opinions, some declared that women are usually superior; others regarded it as a question of difference rather than of superiority or inferiority; all were agreed that when they enjoy the same independence as men, women are quite as loyal as men.

It is undoubtedly true that—­partly as a result of ancient traditions and education, partly of genuine feminine characteristics—­many women are diffident as to their right to moral responsibility and unwilling to assume it.  And an attempt is made to justify their attitude by asserting that woman’s part in life is naturally that of self-sacrifice, or, to put the statement in a somewhat more technical form, that women are naturally masochistic; and that there is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural “sexual subjection” of woman.  It is by no means clear that this statement is absolutely true, and if it were true it would not serve to abolish the moral responsibility of women.

Bloch (Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Part II, p. 178), in agreement with Eulenburg, energetically denies that there is any such natural “sexual subjection” of women, regarding it as artificially produced, the result of the socially inferior position of women, and arguing that such subjection is in much higher degree a physiological characteristic of men than of women. (It has been necessary to discuss this question in dealing with “Love and Pain” in the third volume of these Studies.) It seems certainly clear that the notion that women are especially prone to self-sacrifice has little biological validity.  Self-sacrifice by compulsion, whether physical or moral compulsion, is not worthy of the name; when it is deliberate it is simply the sacrifice of a lesser good for the sake of a greater good.  Doubtless a man who eats a good dinner may