Degeneration may be defined as a departure from the high qualities of a race or a kind. But it is possible to depart from a very great number of cultivated qualities, and still to retain the moral and physical equipment of the good fighter. When, therefore, I seek to explain a good deal of Woman’s discontent with Man, and most of her very justifiable contempt of him, by pointing to his degeneration, I mean that, despite the evidence of the great War, in which the modern European admittedly revealed the primitive fighting qualities in all their pristine strength, the man of to-day in many other respects—in the matter of catholicity of tastes, for instance, versatility of gifts, will-power, vigour, character, and health—shows a marked departure from the higher endowments of his ancestors. The fact that this degeneration is due to the devitalizing, cramping and specialized labours which several generations of Commercialism and Industrialism and excessive “Urbanism” have imposed upon the male sex, can hardly be questioned; and if we are in search of an explanation of Feminism, if we are anxious to discover how and why it is that women are now coming forward in large numbers to measure their strength against men in all those callings and offices which hitherto have been regarded as Man’s special spheres, we may be sure that the true cause of all this does not lie so much in a desirable change in Woman’s nature itself, as it does in an undesirable depreciation in our own general abilities, which women have been only too slow to observe. To point to the great War in such circumstances, is only cant; but like all cant, it is the outcome of a desire to spare our vanity at a moment when everything points indubitably to our humiliation. There is, however, no subject in the whole world, or at least in the whole of our English world, around which more cant has collected, than the subject of sex and the relation of the sexes. But perhaps it would be as well to make quite clear what is precisely meant by “cant” in this respect. With Stendhal, I am of the opinion that cant is created more by vanity than by Puritanism, or the sense of propriety. And it is because vanity is involved, that the fight against cant is so stubborn. If Psycho-Analysis had really assailed our vanity, instead of merely offending our sense of propriety, we should have heard much less about it. Also we have only to think of the huge popular success of writers like Zola in order to assure ourselves that for a man’s work to be hushed up and ignored, he must be guilty of a greater crime than the mere violation of the proprieties or conventions.