And, indeed, there would be something to be said for this view if, by a kind of unemotional parthenogenesis, these spinster workers could breed their own kind, each generation of whom would be ever more perfectly adapted. But unfortunately this cannot be so. People forget that each generation of them is born from mothers who, in an uninterrupted line reaching right back to our anthropoid ancestors, have filled their lives with something more than self-support and business usefulness. Each generation of these unmated women-workers is born from mothers who must have known the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated love, and the clinging devotion of adoring offspring. No break can have occurred in this long dynasty of love, otherwise they—the women-workers themselves—would not be there. It is impossible at present to rear a species of human beings to lovelessness as you can rear a breed of dogs to retrieving or sheep-minding. Love must always have existed one step back. And it is this fact, that these unmated women-workers are all so fatally close to love, all such near blood-relations of love, that makes lovelessness such an ordeal and a trial to them—an ordeal and a trial no human being who has not sinned against society should be made to suffer. Thus the modern world is inclined to be very cruel to the young unmated woman. For, while everything is done to facilitate her self-support and usefulness, no provision is made either to ensure the sublimation of her mating instincts (a problem of almost insuperable difficulty now, though solved with success in the Middle Ages), or to give her the chance of expressing them without dishonour and disgrace. On the contrary, the whole tendency is to ignore, to shelve, and to conceal that aspect of her life; and thousands of bitter or sub-normal women, whose thwarted or deficient passions have unsaddled their natural love of man, are now only too eager to assure her and everybody else that human beings can well get on and be happy without sexual expression—in fact that a spirit and a body can quite easily play the life-long rôle of a disembodied spirit. All this does not mean that the solution of the unmated woman problem is an easy and obvious one, which modern people are too blind to see. But it does mean that the very first step towards its proper solution can never be taken as long as we persist in arguing and behaving as if a full life can be lived by merely paying one’s way. In 1921 the population of England and Wales amounted to 37,885,242 persons, of whom 19,803,022 were females. Of this female population 4,302,568 consisted of children under twelve, and the remainder, amounting to 15,501,454, were divided up as follows: