The omission is due to the belief that votes for women or anybody else are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume. The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The present concentration of feminism in England upon the vote, sometimes involving the refusal of a good end--such as wise legislation--because it was not attained by the means they desire, and arousing all manner of enmity between the sexes, may be an unhappy necessity so long as men refuse to grant what they will assuredly grant before long. But now, and then, the vital matters are the nature of womanhood; the extent of our compliance with Nature's laws in the care of girlhood, whether or not women share in making the transitory laws of man; and the extent to which womanhood discharges its great functions of dedicating and preparing its best for the mothers, and choosing and preparing the best of men for the fathers, of the future. The vote, or any other thing, is good or bad in so far as it serves or hurts these great and everlasting needs. I believe in the vote because I believe it will be eugenic, will reform the conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either sex or both. For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain them; but never for the means in despite of the ends. This first chapter is perhaps unduly long, but it is necessary to state my eugenic faith, since there is neither room nor need for me to reiterate the principles of eugenics in later chapters, and since it was necessary to show that, though this book is written in the interests of individual womanhood, it is consistent with the principles of the divine cause of race-culture, to which, for me, all others are subordinate, and by which, I know, all others will in the last resort be judged. * * * * *