Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/121



‘My short and imperfect acquaintance with the political question, Letty, leads me to much the same conclusions as you draw. It is to be feared that the Bungling party, now in power, may land us in a catastrophe. But sufficient unto the day, etc. Now about the other matter. The perversion of women to which you refer is, I think, capable of explanation. It is a survival, one of the many useless survivals in the evolution of humanity. We have numerous instances of useless survivals in our own persons. There is, for example, the beard, which a large proportion of men in all ages have rid themselves of by shaving, and which women generally do not grow. Our hair and our nails require clipping; we use artificial soap and brushes and sponges; in short, civilised man has to eliminate by art the encumbrance of various survivals or inheritances from his lower physical history. Analogously, we have also moral survivals, which the progress of enlightenment calls upon us to exterminate. We cannot help having inherited them from our lower ancestry, be they apes or what not, but we can exterminate them by culture, and if we fail to do so, we fail to fulfil the mission of our race,—we are retrograding, tending downwards. The subjection of women and the habits of mind which that subjection engenders in women, is the most prominent and the most pernicious of all the moral survivals from a lower world. It is natural only in the sense in which it is natural for everyone to be dirty and ignorant. But the practical difficulty in emancipating our sex is that of rousing women themselves to be earnest in the work. It is the old story of the man in the Bastille; after he had passed a number of years immured in his cell, he felt uncomfortable out of it. And little