This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student
and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were
unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One
class of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty.
Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two men
thought alike, and no woman thought like a man.
Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying
the race in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had
never been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia,
maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women's
property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate,
uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence.
Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did
in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race
only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought
anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American
always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned
hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as
timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if
the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race
question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to
Americans vitally.
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