There is not only to-day to think of, but
to-morrow. The eugenics which ignores the natural differences between
women as individuals, and their still greater natural differences as
potential parents, is only half eugenics; the leading women who in any
way countenance such measures as deprive the blood of the future of its
due contribution from the best women of the present, are leading not
only one sex but the race as a whole to ruin.
If women were not so important as Nature has made them, none of this
would matter. To insist upon it is only to insist upon the importance of
the sex. The remarkable fact, which seems to me to make this protest and
the forthcoming pages so necessary, is that the leading feminists do not
recognize the all-importance of their sex in this regard. They must be
accused of neglecting it and of not knowing how important they are. They
consider the present only, and not the composition of the future. Like
the rest of the world, I read their papers and manifestoes, their
speeches and books, and have done so, and have subscribed to them, for
years; but no one can refer me to a single passage in any of these where
any feminist or suffragist, in Great Britain, at least, militant or
non-militant, has set forth the principle, beside which all others are
trivial, that _the best women must be the mothers of the future_.
Yet this which is thus ignored matters so much that other things matter
only in so far as they affect it.
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