None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds, none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose it was invented by the Church. And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any other could possibly be born of such emotions. Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof. If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their superiority to the future stock.