But now, of this undoubted muscular superiority of men. What has it led to? In early stages of civilisation, Might was Right. A man took what he could and kept it if he could. Nations and governments were founded on the same principle of self-protection and self-aggrandisement, and empires followed. Women did not escape this law of the strongest. In addition to what seems a congenital muscular inferiority, women had the enormous handicap (for fighting purposes) of motherhood. The nine months of gestation and the succeeding period of nourishing and cherishing the infant were, and are, and always will be sufficient reason why women cannot successfully resist men by force. Not infrequently have I heard women, and much more frequently men, say on public platforms that it is not true that women cannot fight; that some women are stronger than some men, and that women are only prevented by men from enrolling in the army and defending their country. This always seems to me the silliest stuff. How could men prevent women from fighting if women wanted to fight and were as strong as men? If women were as strong as men and as fond of using their strength in fight, and if they desired their enfranchisement, how is it that they have not fought for it and won it long ago? But the women’s battle is a far harder one: it is to induce men to give up the primary impulses of animal nature at the command of reason and knowledge; to refrain from taking what they _can_ take, from commanding where they can enforce obedience. And this is a battle which was begun ages ago, and in every age has had its victories,—victories due, not to the pitting of physical force against physical force, but, first, to man’s deep need of woman, which prevented him from destroying her, as he destroyed all other weaker creatures when he had no use for them, and, second, to the mutual love of man and woman and their common bond in the child. Physical force is a great and vastly important part of the forces wielded by man, but it never has been the only one, and it is increasingly being brought under the dominion and guidance of other forces. Women, too, have their physical force, without which the race would be extinguished; and, in the last resort, if we could imagine the brutality of man contemplating a war _à outrance_ against women, their strength would be found to lie, not in the fact that they could conquer men in a physical conflict, but that they could die. For those who can only read what is explicit, I hasten to add that I do not believe such a state of things could ever arise, although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of exterminating the enemy’s women.