But I seek to show in the following pages that, in reality, there is no antagonism between the claims of the future and the present, the race and the individual. On philosophic analysis we must see that, indeed, no living race could come into being, much less endure, in which the interests of individuals as individuals, and the interest of the race, were opposed. If we imagine any such race we must imagine its disappearance in one generation, or in a few generations if the clash of interests were less than complete. Living Nature is not so fiendishly contrived as has sometimes appeared to the casual eye. On the contrary, the natural rule which we see illustrated in all species, animal or vegetable, high or low, throughout the living world, is that the individual is so constructed that his or her personal fulfilment of his or her natural destiny as an individual, is precisely that which best serves the race. Once we learn that individuals were all evolved by Nature for the sake of the race, we shall understand why they have been so evolved in their personal characteristics that in living their own lives and fulfilling themselves they best fulfil Nature's remoter purpose. To this universal and necessary law, without which life could not persist anywhere in any of its forms, woman is no exception; and therein is the reply to those who fear a statement in new terms of the old proposition that women must give themselves up for the sake of the community and its future. Here it is true that whosoever will give her life shall save it. Women must indeed give themselves up for the community and the future; and so must men. Since women differ from men, their sacrifice takes a somewhat different form, but in their case, as in men's, the right fulfilment of Nature's purpose is one with the right fulfilment of their own destiny. There is no antinomy. On the contrary, the following pages are written in the belief and the fear that women are threatening to injure themselves as individuals--and therefore the race, of course--just because they wrongly suppose that a monstrous antinomy exists where none could possibly exist. "No," they say, "we have endured this too long; henceforth we must be free to be ourselves and live our own lives." And then, forsooth, they proceed to try to be other than themselves and live other than the lives for which their real selves, in nine cases out of ten, were constructed. It works for a time, and even for life in the case of incomplete and aberrant women. For the others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else. Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize