And what bye-products they are! God help them!--Who alone can help them--this pathetic rubble of pallid, sickly, suffering, and dejected infant- and child-Life; the violet-hued babies, with their dull eyes glazed by misery, their leaden, half-paralysed limbs; the blind and crippled, halt and deaf, the imbecile and feeble-minded children, apathetic, neurasthenic, joyless; as too, on the other hand, the low-browed, sturdy and soulless, or the debased and evil--All the generation of degeneracy which our deteriorate and enfeebled looms of womanhood are grinding out to-day. Though shut from sight and thought, in the prisons, hospitals and other institutions of our modern civilisations is an ever-swelling, ever-rising, further-menacing tide of diseased, defective, insane and criminal mankind, product of ours and of those others' violations of Natural Law; clogging the River of Life, choking the Springs of Evolution, damming the current of Progress. CHAPTER VII FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE AND PROGRESS "A woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life." I In _Woman and Labour_, Miss Schreiner laments as follows, picturesquely but speciously: "Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples!" A scene is conjured of brute-men with clubs savagely attacking and destroying hapless women's innocent spinning-wheels, as Mrs. Arkwright ruthlessly destroyed her husband's cherished models. Yet who, regarding the subject dispassionately, sees cause for anything but gladness that modern woman has not still to spin the linen of her household and the garments of its members--for anything but thankfulness for that intelligent male-brain which carried the woman-invention of the needle to its higher adaptations in the weaving and the sewing-machine? Who can justly regret that the taking over by men, in factories, of wholesale brewings and bakings, jam-makings, and so forth, has relieved the other sex of ceaseless drudgeries; and in so relieving it of drudgeries of house-keeping has left it free to develop the higher and the more intellectual arts of home-making? "_Slowly but determinedly, as the old fields of labour close up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new_," Miss Schreiner affirms. And to emphasise our determination, the demand is printed in her book, as I have reproduced it, in Italics.