agenic woman, be she nut, maid—old or young—nun, school-teacher, or
bachelor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of
this very diverse class in the past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest
ideals of self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was
meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of superfluous
women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have impoverished
the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who Leslie Stephens
thinks contributed to bring about the Dark Ages, because they were the best and
most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of
heredity and leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas
and training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not yet be
determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.
The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of the inverse
relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is
always a terminal representative in her line of descent. She has taken up and
utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so
overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely
developed individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very apotheosis
of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. While the complete
man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar
power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary functions, so that
should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely performed because
she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the
child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not
love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in the abnormal or
especially incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical years of
adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of
it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-
child system. These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of
the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the
university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated the young
husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual
activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them
good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to
converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was
Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the
racquet and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their
widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes