The fact that great families, with great histories and talents behind them, fall into decadence shows that even in decadent stock are inherences of greatness which might be recruited to greatness again. While apart from all this, the right of Parenthood, with the evolutionary impulse to character and faculty consequent upon the exercise of parental functions, is the birthright of every individual capable of fulfilling such. The counsel of Selective Parenthood is dangerous doctrine, indeed. Given Life, Nature by her methods of Disease is able to eliminate stock too deteriorate for, or beside her purpose. But she alone knows her purpose. And she alone can judge as to what is intrinsic Fitness for Survival.
Selective Parenthood makes, moreover, for the elimination of those valuable object-lessons of inherited defect and disease, whereby Nature points her inestimable morals of healthy and disciplined living. For evasion, too, of those penalties and burdens in the care and maintenance of the Unfit, which a nation justly incurs by such social wrongs and maladministrations as are largely responsible for disease and defect.
The doctrine of operative sterilisation is not only humanly repugnant but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it is essentially evil.
Some momentous morals of the Feminist trend are pointed by the Insect-world, which may be regarded as a devolutionary back-water, wherein Life is slowly ebbing toward extinction by fluctuating out in ever smaller, meaner, drabber, ineffective, pulseless and spectral existences--chill and teeming myriads unwarmed by the throb of emotion, unillumined by the light of Mind. Dust which, raised from dust by power of Life, has caught the trick of living, and goes on living and perpetuating, without cause or impulse other than age-old, time-worn mechanistic habit imparted by the state of living.
And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are Dominant--larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of _Insectivoræ_ by way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is seen as appanage and victim of the female.