Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business, athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these, keep all the members of their households--husband, children, servants--more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one or more actually invalided, perhaps.
If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly charged, until equilibrium is established.
Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic babes that working-mothers--and most particularly _pregnant_ working-mothers--bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie limply, or sit hunched upon the woman's lap, nerveless, wasted, apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched limbs soft as butter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps, from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject of "infantilism"; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children, in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss cantons.
"_Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook._"
While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic response and resource in the mother. Feminism in _un_making the mother, is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race's increasingly valuable and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.
Life is so constituted that its most cruel disabilities and evils are borne inevitably by the children in the van of the Great March. These hapless ones it is--soft buds pushing from the Human Tree--that bear the brunt of the evolutionary impulse.