But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them. It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course, upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race, which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink itself to death. CHAPTER XXII CONCLUSION The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our search to principles. For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters, if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic principles which determine the life and continuance of living things. Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a thousand times in the past.