Difficult as at present is the problem, we need to understand that we cannot afford to be wasteful of the strength of women. We are being wasteful. The physiological life even of the unmarried woman ought to handicap her in almost every kind of work. Long hours of standing, the lifting of heavy weights, any kind of drain on the nervous power, cannot fail to do harm. There are days when every young girl and woman who may have to bear children, however strong, ought to release tension, to step aside from work to maintain full health. I am filled with impatience at our pretence on this question of women’s health. There is a difference between the work capacity of the woman and the work capacity of the man. Sex must play a far larger part, making far stronger claims on the strength of the girl and the woman than it ever does in the lives of boys and men. It is vain to assume that because women are willing, and apparently able, to do the same work now as men in the past have done, that, therefore, it is wise to allow them to do it. The price of the violent energy, so wastefully being poured out, will have to be paid. Countless women and girls are using up now the nervous energy and strength of which they are merely the pilots and guardians; the health and calm of spirit which should be stored and transmitted to generations to come. The increased activity and exertion daily demanded from child-bearers must be anti-social in its racial effects. Either these girls, constantly stimulated, over-excited, and robbed of the tranquillity they need, will bear enfeebled children, or, what is more likely, through the direct premium placed on childlessness, fewer and fewer children will be born, and from this there may tend to follow a further deadening and even a crushing out of the maternal instinct. Children will not be wanted. I pointed out in the earlier chapters of my book[105] that such a transformation of impulse may take place. The parental instinct is not fixed, and disuse is the swiftest way to decay. Think what this must mean to the life values of the future. I believe it is not possible to estimate how far-reaching may be the results of what is now being done so quickly and so recklessly. By our absurd denials and our ignorance we shall have brought down upon us this evil—our punishment for conceiving sex in women as something too terrible to be faced in its reality. Let us understand what it is that we shall be doing. We are built up of habits just as a house is built up of bricks. And what motherhood is going to be in the future depends on our desires and our action to-day.