Only recently, for instance, when the 1921 census revealed that there were approximately 2,000,000 more women than men in Great Britain—that is to say, 2,000,000 women who on the monogamous principle could not be expected to find mates—several prominent people wrote to the papers protesting indignantly that these women were not superfluous, and arguing that there was “enough work in the world” for all the women. These people wrote as if the whole question were an economic one, and that, provided the two million unmated women could only make themselves self-supporting in their singleness, the difficulties of the case would be entirely overcome.[15] But this attitude towards the question was ridiculously unsympathetic. For, if the only object in life were to become self-supporting by means of work, one would not require to be either a man or a woman; a neuter, after the style of the worker-bee, would be all that one required to resemble. But the attitude of these prominent people was unfortunately worse than unsympathetic; it was insulting and dishonest. For, to tell a body of two million women that they need not despair, that even if they could find no mates, there would be work enough for them in order to render them self-supporting, was to assume, without enquiry, that they _were_ neuters, or that they _were_ capable of leading satisfactory lives as neuters. It was at least tantamount to assuming that they would be content in leading the lives of neuters—an assumption insulting both to their physical as well as to their mental development, and one which, having not a fact to support it, was entirely dishonest. Apart from all this, however, it amounted to a vulgar narrowing down of all earthly aspirations and desires, to the economic struggle—to success in the task of finding sustenance. The Holy Catholic Church was more honest in this, and more practical than we are. It told all those women for whom society failed to provide their principal adaptations, that they could find comfort, occupation, and even a high purpose, by entering the Church, but it was frank enough to add: if you do so you must turn your back for ever upon those things for which you were built, those things to which your whole body was ingeniously and artfully adjusted and contrived. And even when the system broke down, as it frequently did,[16] at least where Life was illicitly found in the convent or the monastery, it was found and enjoyed _secretly_, under the respectable auspices of a powerful institution, and not on the streets of big cities where the fruits are nothing but distress, disgrace and disease.