If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is reaching a definite issue. These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the _organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false. Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it is the Great Lie. And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations; we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago. But the interdependence of the sexes is so far from being a new fact that it is as old as the evolution of sex, and the decadence and disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female sex alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the continuance of the race, both sexes sink with either, and neither can swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient of facts to-day that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists who seek to do without man,--except for the minimum physiological purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who tell us that "men made the State,"--a sufficiently shameful admission--and that women have no business with these things. Do not their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have achieved so little?