CHAPTER XXII
CONCLUSION
The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far
from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many
subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included
under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our
search to principles.
For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in
these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and
wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on
the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now
proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture
is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters,
if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on
which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must
hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation
and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic
principles which determine the life and continuance of living things.
Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will
come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a
thousand times in the past.
None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the
present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what
kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of
what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed
women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not
want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other
influences which determine public opinion.
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