All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to adapt woman for the love-passion, and to draw and bind her mate to her. And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her. Woman is "_une malade_," because, throughout the more than thirty years of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which, biologically speaking, are _minor childbirths_; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable constitutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance) perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood. When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow constitutional strain or undue effort. Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another. Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend. * * * * * The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female. IV