Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/37

 physics pain, but it must be the labour we delight in. Labour brings joy and satisfaction, but it must be the labour we can do. Labour educates, elevates, and refines when blessed by public opinion and honoured with public esteem. More than all, through labour only can the race exist, through labour only can it develop. Those individuals who cease to work, either with their muscle or with their brains, either for themselves or for the community, are bringing their own doom upon their heads and upon the heads of their offspring a curse. It is with nations as with individuals, they cannot grow unless they labour. It is with a sex as with a race and with an individual, it degenerates unless it works.

Far back in the dim days of the past, farther back than the mind and imagination of most can properly travel, when the human race had just emerged from the slime in which its animal progenitors had wallowed, when the tiger and the ape were king, and when the new-born soul of man struggled with the spirit of the jungle for its earliest expression, the two halves of humanity were equally endowed. The strength of muscle, the swiftness of limb, the brightness of eye necessary for the satisfaction of their rude needs were the enjoyment of man and woman alike. Like the lioness of the African desert, the mate of the first man