It is, however, very doubtful indeed whether anything whatsoever will be done to relieve the nation of what, in the mildest language, can be regarded as little less than a spiritual and material scourge. Modern society is so thoroughly and deeply saturated with feminist prejudices and ideas, and the sentiments which most promote feminine power and feminine tastes are so universally popular both in the Press and in modern literature generally, that anyone who speaks on the sex question with an honest regard for reality, and with a non-romantic understanding of its fundamental features, is not only foredoomed to a cold and even hostile reception, but every year finds it more and more difficult to obtain a fair and exhaustive hearing. For, as we have already said, the growth of Feminism has been so steady and insidious, that thousands of men and women to-day are Feminists without knowing it, without ever having questioned it. A cold feverless appreciation of the radical principles underlying the relations and the nature of the sexes, whether in fiction or in a textbook, is now practically certain to be decried, and to be regarded as a literary _faux pas_, and while in Byron’s days it brought a man into evil odour, at present, after one hundred years of Progress, it completely discredits him.[141] It is not probable, therefore, that anything contained in this chapter is likely to be read with sympathy or with comprehension by the modern world; but if it conveys to a few isolated and lonely spirits the message that they have been waiting for, and makes them feel perhaps that, although they may not be on the eve of a deep national antifeminist (_not_ anti-feminine) movement, they are at least not entirely alone, it will have accomplished all that its author can possibly expect. FOOTNOTES: [102] In the _Laws of Manu_ (Bk. IX, 89) there is a passage which seems to show that spinsterhood of this kind is specially recommended by the religious Founder of Brahmanism. In Bk. IX, verse 89, we read: “But the maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s house until death, than that he should ever give her to a man destitute of good qualities.” [103] See p. 248. [104] See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., p. 105), where, referring to the vital impulses of woman, she says: “When these are not expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved things, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations.”