The distressing fact is that the number of these women who in England cheerfully survive a life in which their most important organs and instincts have been wholly neglected and spurned, is increasing at such a rate that there is hardly a circle in England that cannot boast of one or two of them. And seeing that their existence is only possible where reproductive impulses are low, atonic, and seriously below standard, their increase is one of the surest indications we possess of the declining vitality of our race.[132] Although, in the negative spinster, the sex-impulses are hardly audible to her consciousness, she reveals in her actions many of the motivations of her positive sister. On a lower key, for instance, she may seek compensations of all kinds for the absence of sex-expression; the only feature that will distinguish her behaviour along this line from that of her positive sister will be the inferior zeal or fanaticism with which she enters into the particular compensatory occupation or activity adopted. She may show the same fondness for children, but in an attenuated form; she may reveal the same delight in acquiring power over them, both bodily and spiritually; she may manifest the usual sadistic tendencies, with their inverted correlatives, humanitarianism, extreme sentimentality, and hyper-sensitiveness, and she may show the same general misanthropy, overlapping her sex-antagonism. In the negative spinster, however, all these symptoms are likely to be very much more faint than in her positive sister; nevertheless, she is just as likely as the latter to die honoured and respected by her Church and the community, for the “unselfish” humanitarianism of her life, and the warm-heartedness she showed to everything that was feeble, degenerate, botched, sick, very young, very aged, dumb, blind, poor or utterly helpless. (3) THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPINSTERS AS BREAD-WINNERS AND INDEPENDENT FUND-HOLDERS The thousands of spinsters of all classes who are now achieving “independence,” both in commerce and industry—not to mention the professions[133]—naturally only increase the acuteness of the economic difficulties which make their self-support a necessity; for, by competing with male labour they only aggravate the severity of the struggle, and increase ever further and further the age at which men can safely undertake matrimony. In this sense alone the influence of the spinster on our economic life is a very serious one.