Fifthly, it is never of that nerve-racking nature which, while demanding unremitting attention, also destroys attention owing to its lack of interest and all personal value.[134] Now, however, that women have become active competitors with men in those very occupations to which modern men owe the principal features of their degeneration, it cannot be expected that the female of the species is going to escape any more happily than her male has done the worst consequences of besotting and specializing labour; and it is therefore inevitable that in a few generations we shall witness the evanescence in woman of that catholicity of tastes and interests and that versatility of gifts which has until lately differentiated her from her male companion. We shall also witness in her that same bodily degeneration that has come over man, and yet it is difficult to see how or when the movement that now leads women to engage in these pursuits can be arrested. The fact that this movement was largely initiated and supported by that body of unattached females roughly grouped under the heading “Surplus Women,” cannot well be denied; but it does not follow from this that it is a permanent evil in our midst. For, if the problem of the surplus woman, and of those who are misled by her, be attacked along lines which have as their ultimate aim the marriage of all women, it does not seem impossible that something may be done to arrest a tendency which, from the standpoint of woman’s future, must be bad, and which, from the standpoint of the future of the race, is nothing less than alarming. The surprising feature about this movement which during the last fifty years has led the bulk of girls and young women into the very occupations to which modern man himself owes his besotment and miserable limitations, is that those who become the victims of it—that is to say the vast majority of women workers in Commerce, Industry, the Civil Service and the Professions, enter joyously, and almost with a whoop of triumph into the various callings with which they achieve what they claim to be economic independence. Not only that, but those who contemplate the procession of them marching into these callings, stand and applaud and congratulate each other on the spectacle.