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The question of the parasitism of woman is, I think, very vital, very important; it explains many phenomena which nothing else explains; and it will be of increasing importance. But for the moment there are other aspects of woman's relation to labour practically quite as pressing.
We are not aware that any representation has yet been made in the region of plastic art of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats itself and that also may come. These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societies laid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of parasitism than the male.
Everywhere, in the past as in the present, the parasitism of the female heralds the decay of a nation or class, and as invariably indicates disease as the pustules of smallpox upon the skin indicate the existence of a purulent virus in the system. We are, indeed, far from asserting that the civilisations of the past which have decayed, have decayed alone through the parasitism of their females.
In simple villages, there are few body servants, no able-bodied individuals who fetch and carry at the word of command, or who only stand and wait for the moment when some whim, fancy or real need may call for their services. Village life, with its limited area and still more limited resources, has little economic surplus upon which parasitism can feed.
Let us again consider more closely why this is so. We have seen that, in the past, no such thing as the parasitism of the entire body or large majority of the females inhabiting any territory was possible.
Dufour also had admirably grasped the place of the insect in the general harmony of the universe, and he clearly perceived that parasitism, that imbrication of mutually usurping lives, is "a law of equilibration, whose object is to set a limit to the excessive multiplication of individuals of the same type," that the parasites are predestined to an imprescriptible mission, and that this mysterious law "defies all explanation."
And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched air, of reproductive life. But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism.
Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges? Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo?
Sold in the market to the highest bidder, war captives and their descendants became chattel slaves. As civilizations were expanded by conquest and matured by struggle, they developed some type of forced labor to balance the increased parasitism of the masters and the growing numbers who were called upon to produce "services" rather than material goods.
Prostitution can never be adequately dealt with, either from the moral or the scientific standpoint, unless its relation to the general phenomenon of female parasitism be fully recognised.
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