CONTENTS
VIII — FEMINISM AND MASCULINISM
IX — THE MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN
XI — THE CONQUEST OF VENEREAL DISEASE
XII — THE NATIONALISATION OF HEALTH
XIV — THE PRODUCTION OF ABILITY
XVI — THE MEANING OF THE BIRTH-RATE
XVII — CIVILISATION AND THE BIRTH-RATE
From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to-day has brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past. Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European Warfare, Is War Diminishing? come to the conclusion that England during the period of her great activity in the world has been "fighting about half the time." We had begun to look on war as belonging to the past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England "a love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct." Now we have awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been "fighting about half the time."
Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature among the solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To-day we turn to the war-like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the enemies who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of England.
But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the past. I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the letters which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514) plunged into war. One reads them to-day with vivid int