The only circumstance that can avert this ultimate development is the discovery by science of a means of determining the sex of the ovum. If this can be done, then, of course, only a certain small number of males (½%) will be reared every year, and the periodical slaughter will be avoided. But in this connection it should be remembered that man will long since have grown too dull to be capable of scientific wonders of any kind; and, as it is not in woman’s nature to be inventive or to make great discoveries, the probability is that society will petrify at the level of mechanical and scientific progress reached at the moment of man’s most serious decline, and, therefore, that the periodical slaughter of males will remain just as much a necessity with the human female workers as with the worker-bees. Meanwhile, to these millions of workers life will have become little more than a dreary, colourless, and hopeless round of toil and self-sacrifice. The only sources of excitement and pleasure will be the pastimes offering chances for public parade and appeals to vanity, the criticism of the latest Government foods and their corresponding digestive aids, and the reading in the papers about the prosecution of refractory female characters, either for sedition, immorality, or indolence. Under immorality will be included all attempts at writing, reading, or circulating any poem, novel, or treatise faintly reminiscent of love as we now know it, all attempts at unearthing or recalling the “obscene” literature of former ages—particularly the romantic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and all efforts to draw, paint, carve, or otherwise represent any graphic image of barbaric woman, when she still bore on her body the traces of the corporeal equipment for motherhood.