This type, which can scarcely be said to _live_, but merely to frolic through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the nobler aspirations and the functions of the best womanhood.
It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a sex whereof The Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural aptitudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired--in substitution for her native ones--do not alter her inherent constitution of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some of the characteristics of an opposite sex, _but never the morale_; which is inborn and inherent to the natural sex-characteristics.
Faculty declines in the inverse order of its development. The bloom and beauty of the peach and of the flower are the last things to come--and the first to go. So, in forfeiting her womanly qualities, woman forfeits earliest the best of these. Love and purity and spiritual aspiration perish first; with the result that the lower-grade female Subconscious emotionalism, instinct and palpitant with animal impulse, comes into play.
Man requires to degenerate to far inferior levels than is the case with woman, before he so loses his normal rationalism as to forfeit his sense of proportion and of his responsibility with regard to material affairs, and that stern obligation to conform to environmental conditions which has been the impelling force of male development. Irresponsibility is in him an acquired--and a feminine--defect; not an inherent failing of his sex. The very basis of the manly character is a recognition of the male responsibility in life's affairs. It was the impulse of man's primal struggle. It is the mark of his civilised manhood.