most complete celibacy, not less would the most typical of modern men
shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to the companionship of

an always fainting, weeping, and terrified Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone
epoch.

If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern
woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong,

fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the
New Man; engendered there by his own heighest needs and aspirations; and

nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that
which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in the

ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.
Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena of our

modern world, who see in the Woman's Movement of our day any emotional
movement of the female against the male, of the woman away from the man.

We have called the Woman's Movement of our age an endeavour on the part of
women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as the old

slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an inactive
dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another side, the

Woman's Movement might not less justly be called a part of a great movement
of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards common occupations,

common interests, common ideals, and towards an emotionalsympathy between
the sexes more deeply founded and more indestructible than any the world

has yet seen.
But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth

underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity
between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and

females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies, and
often among the very classes forming our typically advanced sections, so

much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the present day?
The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination,

struggle, and consequentsuffering which undoubtedly do exist when we
regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern

societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the
sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict

between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch
the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining

element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the
individual has reached.

It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome
reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid evolution

and change. The continually changing material conditions of life, with
their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects of human

affairs, render our societies the most complex and probably the most mobile
and unsettled which the world has ever seen. As the result of this

rapidity of change and complexity, there must continually exist a large
amount of disco-ordination, and consequently, of suffering.

In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation for
hundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no change in

the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moral
principles of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexual

institutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with these
conditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity,

pervades the society.
In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societies

find themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almost
day brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is the

amount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive, and
sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the new conditions,

acting at different angles of intensity on the different individual members
composing the society, according to their positions and varying

intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellous complexity and
dissimilarity in the different individual parts, that the intensest rupture

and disco-ordination between individuals is inevitable; and sexual ideals
and relationships must share in the universal condition.

In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix illustration may be allowed)
where for countlessgenerations the conditions of life had remained

absolutely unchanged; where for ages it had been necessary that all males
should employ themselves in subduing wild beasts and meeting dangerous

foes, polygamy might universally have been a necessity, if the race were to
exist and its numbers be kept up; and society, recognising this, polygamy

would be an institutionuniversally approved and submitted to, however much
suffering it entailed. If food were scarce, the destruction of superfluous

infants and of the aged might also always have been necessary for the good
of the individuals themselves as well as of society, and the whole society

would acquiesce in it without any moral doubt. If an eclipse of the sun
had once occurred in connection with the appearance of a certain new

insect, they mightyuniversally regard that insect as a god causing it; and
ages might pass without anything arising to disprove their belief. There

would be no social or religious problem; and the view of one man would be
the view of all men; and all would be more or less in harmony with the

established institution and customs.
But, supposing the sudden arrival of strangers armed with superior weapons

and knowledge, who should exterminate all wild beasts and render war and
the consequent loss of male life a thing of the past; not only would the

male be driven to encroach on the female's domain of domesticagriculture
and labour generally, but the males, not being so largely destroyed, they

would soon equal and surpass in numbers the females; and not only would it
then become a moot matter, "a problem," which labours were or were not to

be performed by man and which by woman, but very soon, not the woman alone
nor the man alone, but both, would be driven to speculate as to the

desirability or necessity of polygamy, which, were men as numerous as
women, would leave many males without sex companions. The more intelligent

and progressive individuals in the community would almost at once arrive at
the conclusion that polygamy was objectionable; the most fearless would

seek to carry their theory into action; the most ignorant and unprogressive
would determinately stick to the old institutions as inherited from the

past, without reason or question; differences of ideal would cause conflict
and dissension in all parts of the body social, and suffering would ensue,

where all before was fixed and determinate. So also if the strangers
introduced new and improved methods of agriculture, and food became

abundant, it would then at once strike the most far-seeing and readily
adaptable members of the community, both male and female, that there was no

necessity for the destruction of their offspring; old men and women would
begin seriously to object to being hastened to death when they realised

that starvation did not necessarily stare them in the face if they survived
to an extreme old age; the most stupid and hide-bound members of the

community would still continue to sacrifice parents and offspring long
after the necessity had ceased, under the influence of traditional bias;

many persons would be in a state of much moral doubt as to which course of
action to pursue, the old or the new; and bitter conflict might rage in the

community on all these points. Were the strangers to bring with them
telescopes, looking through which it might at once clearly be seen that an

eclipse of the sun was caused merely by the moon's passing over its face,
the more intelligent members of the community would at once come to the

conclusion that the insect was not the cause of eclipses, would cease to
regard it as a god, and might even kill it; the more stupid and immobile

section of the community might refuse to look through the telescope, or
looking might refuse to see that it was the moon which caused the eclipse,

and their deep-seated reverence for the insect, which was the growth of
ages, would lead them to regard as impious those individuals who denied its

godhead, and might even lead to the physicaldestruction of the first
unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its

parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems;
and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-

ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new
conditions! There might be immense gain in many directions; lives

otherwise sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage
of existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle

would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and

religious ideals and institutions.
An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the

present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in
every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no

resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our
civilised societies in remoteagricultural districts, the old social

conditions may remain partlyundisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our
societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide

diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press;
the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where

not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together
under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social

condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the