The question is not how much money can you get from
another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from
Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the
primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as
against anything else,--for unless one is fed, of what use is anything
else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life
are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive
races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against
heavy odds, have always known--that at all costs the insatiable
destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means
of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and
unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life
are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the
workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the
women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses,
teachers.
The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and
perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such
immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human
creature" _in antithesis_ to "the primal physical functions of
maternity." The sex which came first and remains first in the immediacy
and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its
economic claims--in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term--upon the
worth of those relations.
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