I close this chapter abruptly, fully realising that Eugenic zeal has carried me beyond any narrow view of elementary education, and will inevitably lead the nation into economic controversy. The history of all reform encourages us to persevere. Neither fears of expense, nor metaphysical considerations of parental duty, nor sentimental objections to State intrusion have prevented a nation (when faced with a foreign foe) pledging all its resources, taking sons from mothers and husbands from wives, and using land, railways and stores to prosecute a war deemed necessary for national defence. I am convinced that we have only to realise the national danger and we shall heartily follow the Eugenic lead, even if it costs us the price of a fifth-rate war. CHAPTER VII EUGENICS AND THE MODERN FEMINIST MOVEMENT Eugenics is not essentially concerned with the right to vote nor is Eugenics specially interested in such abstract questions as the relative voting qualifications of the sexes. If these things really weighed at all Eugenics would naturally favour fitness instead of sex as the qualification for electoral enfranchisement. At present Eugenics views the feminist movement from the point of view of political power as a means to national efficiency. This standpoint is the more natural because there is every reason to believe that while the objective of the feminist is nominally Votes for Women it is actually an assertion of woman's all-round equality with men. I believe it will be a perilous enterprise, fraught with grave danger to the State if women successfully organise as a sex-party, prepared to study every question from the special interests or supposed interests of women. However much this definite policy may be repudiated it is a genuine danger, to which a prolonged suffrage agitation is bound, ostensibly or unintentionally, to contribute. It is to the interest of all who do not take a sex-party view of citizenship to abbreviate this struggle. It seems illogical, unnatural and undesirable that there should be a sex-basis of citizenship rights. All deprecation of anything even remotely approaching a sex-war is an argument for the acknowledgment of Women's claim to electoral equality with men. It is incredible that the mere extension of the franchise can create a revolution; a revolution is historically rather to be expected from refusing the suffrage to a class containing intelligent, capable law-abiding adults.