"Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman, turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed--these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities, nature and environment. "The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had become a butcher, 'Go thou and do likewise,' and an American young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic phenomena. "In our programme of civilization, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman, and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother. "I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively. "From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood. "But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man--the superman--will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day." CHAPTER IV THE LAW OF CONSERVATION