Let us return now to the question of nursing capacity. "Bass voices" and "beards" are doubtless unlovely in woman, but their extensive appearance would be of no consequence at all compared with the disappearance or weakening of the mammalian function which, as everyone knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go. Things may be bad, things _are_ very bad: the lot of woman must be raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr. Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic dependence, but with it you stamp out the future. It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than they used to do. It is as generally admitted that this is often deliberate choice, and we all know that it is often economic necessity: the human mother "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature," such as the factory affords, and cannot simultaneously stay at home to nurse her baby, making men--for which, as a "natural industry" of women, even as against making, say, lead-glaze for china, there may be something to be said.