You are entitled to pity these women for their virgin lives, for the serious unadaptedness of their condition, and for their lifelong and secret conviction that they are useless; but to defend their existence as if it were _not_ a burden, as if it were not a dangerous scourge in our midst, would be to refuse to recognize the truth about the matter, and this truth, however unpleasant and disturbing, can be dealt with only if it is honestly recognized and faced. The less wealthy among them, right down the scale to the level of those who have only £300 a year of their own, are certainly less baneful and onerous, seeing that they dam up less of this world’s goods in their particular cul-de-sac; but the ultimate cumulative effect of their combined existences constitutes an imposition not much more tolerable than that of their wealthier sisters. Nor should it be forgotten that a not inconsiderable portion of the harm resulting from this peculiarly British scourge consists in the amount of false opinion, perniciously erroneous judgments on all things, and distorted spiritual influences, which annually emanate from these spinsters’ homes, and which, backed as they frequently are by the power of wealth, are spread abroad with all the prestige and pomp that opulence can impart. The English outlook, and English opinion generally, are to a great extent contaminated by this spinster influence. Our politics are no longer immune from it; our policy both at home and abroad is largely infected by our atmosphere surcharged both with the breath and the ideas of spinsters. Our literature is to no small extent governed by their taste,[136] our newspapers are obviously designed to offer no affront to their morbid sensibilities, and our stage is entirely governed by their criticism. Feminism, with all its worst consequences, is largely their creation—the child of their idleness and their superfluous wealth; and if Feminism has spread so far, and become a creed so universally and almost unconsciously accepted, it is due largely to this large class of powerful, misguided and idle unattached females. They constitute a malignant power, because they are a body bound by no responsibilities; they pursue an erratic course directed entirely by their abnormal emotions and crazy outlook on life, because in the first place they are abnormal, secondly because they are unguided except by those whose advantage it is to mislead them, thirdly because they are limited by no close family ties in the expenditure of their wealth during life or in its disposal after death; and finally they are a wasteful and squandering body because in their frantic efforts to coerce their contemporaries into believing they are important, they shrink from no extremes and no excesses in order to take up as conspicuous and prominent a place as possible in their small world. * * * * * CONCLUSION