Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Engineers, Machinery, Industry, Declinism, National Efficiency, Sex, Obstetrics, Human Development, Nutrition, Gender, Analogy, Entomology

    Records the end of the bitter seven month strike originally called by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which has now agreed to accept 'the employer's right to manage their machinery and their workshops in their own way'. Despite the victory of the employers, 'for seven months all their plant was at a standstill, while their business drifted to Germany and the United States, from which some of it will never come back'. (113) Also reports the 'claim of a German scientist, Dr. Schenck, to have discovered the secret of fixing the sex of unborn children. By dieting the mother in a peculiar fashion this Dr. Schenck asserts he can decide whether the expected stranger shall be boy or girl. The bees we know can develop the grubs of neuters into queens by altering their diet, but hitherto science has failed to penetrate the secret of how it is done'. Furthermore, 'If the analogy of the bees may be taken as a guide, the control of sex would rapidly be followed by its elimination. Signor Ferrero has just proclaimed that the comparative sexlessness of northern nations is the secret of their industrial supremacy. From this there is but a step to the evolution of a race of entirely sexless workers which, like neuter bees, would be consecrated from birth to sterility and labour'. (114)