industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her person,

or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or
was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by

dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the
lack of productive activity. And as the hand whitened and frame softened,

till, at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were all the
constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from the

instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into the hands
of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to age her

offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so
complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life, the

glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful; and she
sought to evade it, not because of its interference with more imperious

duties to those already born of her, or to her society, but because her
existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy in strenuousexertion and

endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life became for her
merely the gratification of her own physical and sexual appetites, and the

appetites of the male, through the stimulation of which she could maintain
herself. And, whether as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she

contributed nothing to the active and sustaining labours of her society.
She had attained to the full development of that type which, whether in

modern Paris or New York or London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome,
is essentially one in its features, its nature, and its results. She was

the "fine lady," the human femaleparasite - the most deadly microbe which
can make its appearance on the surface of any social organism. (The

relation of female parasitism generally, to the peculiarphenomenon of
prostitution, is mental" target="_blank" title="a.基本的 n.原理">fundamental. Prostitution can never be adequately" target="_blank" title="ad.足够地；适当地">adequately dealt

with, either from the moral or the scientificstandpoint, unless its
relation to the general phenomenon of female parasitism be fully

recognised. It is the failure to do this which leaves so painful a sense
of abortion on the mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the

question, whether made from the emotionalplatform of the moral reformer,
or the intellectualplatform of the would-be scientist. We are left with a

feeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that the
knife has not reached the core.)

Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full
development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any

dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece,
Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have

produced the same social disease among wealthy and dominant races; and
again and again when the nation so affected has come into contact with

nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has contributed
to its destruction.

In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood was richly
and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. Not the mass of the

woman alone, but the king's wife and the prince's daughter do we find going
to the well to bear water, cleansing the household linen in the streams,

feeding and doctoring their households, manufacturing the clothing of their
race, and performing even a share of the highest social functions as

priestesses and prophetesses. It was from the bodies of such women as
these that sprang that race of heroes, thinkers, and artists who laid the

foundations of Grecian greatness. These females underlay their society as
the solid and deeply buried foundations underlay the more visible and

ornate portions of a great temple, making its structure and persistence
possible. In Greece, after a certain lapse of time, these virile labouring

women in the upper classes were to be found no more. The accumulated
wealth of the dominant race, gathered through the labour of slaves and

subject people, had so immensely increased that there was no longer a call
for physical labour on the part of the dominant womanhood; immured within

the walls of their houses as wives or mistresses, waited on by slaves and
dependents, they no longer sustained by their exertion either their own

life or the life of their people. The males absorbed the intellectual
labours of life; slaves and dependents the physical. For a moment, at the

end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood of
Greece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliant

intellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous colours in
the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking; but the heart of Greece was

already rotting and her vigour failing. Increasingly, division and
dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male advanced in

culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil while the female
sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life, and thus was made

ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not bridge. The abnormal
institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane

was one, and the most serious result, of this severance. The inevitable
and invincible desire of all highly developed human natures, to blend with

their sexual relationships their highest intellectual interests and
sympathies, could find no satisfaction or response in the relationship

between the immured, comparativelyignorant and helplessfemales of the
upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant, cultured, and many-sided males

who formed its dominant class in the fifth and fourth centuries. Man
turned towards man; and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting human

life, was severed from the loftiest and profoundest phases of human
emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable little life

between the walls of her house, and Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing
philosophy and morals with Alcibiades; and the race decayed at its core.

(See Jowett's translation of Plato's "Banquet"; but for full light on this
important question the entire literature of Greece in the fifth and fourth

centuries B.C. should be studied.) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier
still a Sappho, burst through the confining bonds of woman's environment,

and with the force of irresistiblegenius broke triumphantly into new
fields of action and powerful mental activity, standing side by side with

the male; but their cases were exceptional. Had they, or such as they,
been able to tread down a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women

might have followed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of
the dominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise from

their condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken their
share in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race,

Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourth
century, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls in at

the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip, and
then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlike son, who

was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitable Olympia. (Like
almost all men remarkable for either good or evil, Alexander inherited from

his mother his most notable qualities--his courage, his intellectual
activity, and an ambitionindifferent to any means that made for his own

end. Fearless in her life, she fearlessly met death "with a courage worthy
of her rank and domineering character, when her hour of retribution came";

and Alexander is incomprehensible till we recognise him as rising from the
womb of Olympia.) Nor could she have been swept clean, a few hundred years

later, from Thessaly to Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples
destroyed, her effete women captured by the hordes of the Goths--a people

less skilfully armed and less civilised than the descendants of the race of
Pericles and Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk

whose monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless,
labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the

ends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men.
In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured

mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden,
though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller than

that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to supplant
her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman in the days

of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functions and bore the
whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia, the great Roman

dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep into the night, and
whose personal dignity was so dear to her that, violated, she sought only

death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi, one of the last of the great
line, we find everywhere, erect, labouring, and resolute, the Roman woman

who gave birth to the men who built up Roman greatness. A few centuries
later, and Rome also had reached that dangerous spot in the order of social

change which Greece had reached centuries before her. Slave labour and the
enjoyment of the unlimited spoils of subject races had done away for ever

with the demand for physical labour on the part of the members of the
dominant race. Then came the period when the male still occupied himself

with the duties of war and government, of legislation and self-culture; but
the Roman matron had already ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in

jewels and fine clothing, brought at the cost of infinite human labour from
the ends of the earth, nourished on delicate victuals, prepared by others'

hands, she sought now only with amusement to pass away a life that no
longer offered her the excitement and joy of active productiveexertion.

She frequented theatres or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove in her
chariot; and like more modern counterparts, painted herself, wore patches,

affected an artistic walk, and a handshake with the elbow raised and the
fingers hanging down. Her children were reared by dependents; and in the

intellectual labour and government of her age she took small part, and was
fit to take none. There were not wantingwriters and thinkers who saw