Post-Prandial Philosophy, page 99 by Grant Allen
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as in the cathedral towns, accordingly, during the dark ages of art, that exceptional musical ability was most likely to show itself. More particularly was this so on the Welsh border, where the two favouring influences of race and practice coincided--at Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, long known for the most musical towns in England.
Cause and effect act and react. Art is a product of the artistic temperament. The artistic temperament is a product of the long hereditary cultivation of art. And where a broad basis of this temperament exists among the people, owing to intermixture of artistically-minded stocks, one is liable to get from time to time that peculiar combination of characteristics--sensuous, intellectual, spiritual--which results in the highest and truest artist.
XXIII.
A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA.
You ask me what would be the position of women in an ideal community. Well, after dinner, imagination may take free flight. Suppose, till the coffee comes, we discuss that question.
Woman, I take it, differs from man in being the sex sacrificed to reproductive necessities.
Whenever I say this, I notice my good friends, the women's-rights women, with whom I am generally in pretty close accord, look annoyed and hurt. I can never imagine why. I regard this point as an original inequality of nature, which it should be the duty of human society to redress as far as possible, like all other inequalities. Women are not on the average as tall as men; nor can they lift as heavy weights, or undergo, as a rule, so much physical labour. Yet civilised society recognises their equal right to the protection of our policemen, and endeavours to neutralise their physical inequality by the collective guarantee of all the citizens. In the same way I hold that women in the lump have a certain disadvantage laid upon them by nature, in the necessity that some or most among them should bear children; and this disadvantage I think the men in a well-ordered State would do their best