nation lies mainly--nay, entirely--in eugenics, in sinking every other consideration for that great and central one--the perfecting of the conditions of maternity. But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman’s whistling was not when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not have been troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper. Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a mother--less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid it down that there are certain things which women can’t do; and so, when the exceptional woman does it, she is--or she was the day before yesterday--labelled “unwomanly.” I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly accomplishment--something attained--which has not been so generally attained hitherto. Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact, so impossible to maintain. For you can have no code or standard of manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence, anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a false code of womanliness.