need of insemination, creates separate husband cells to starve in
clusters, while `she' hogs all the food-supply for the production
of eggs.

This small flight into biology is made merely for the dim light
it may cast on the Kipling half-truth. It is not made to explain
why women criminals are more deadly, more cruel, more deeply lost
in turpitude, than their male colleagues. But it may help to
explain why so many crime-writers, following Lombroso, THINK the
female more deadly.

There is something so deeply shocking in the idea of a woman
being other than kind and good, something so antagonistic to the
smug conception of Eve as the ``minist'ring angel, thou,'' that
leaps to extremes in expression are easy.

A drunken woman, however, and for example, is not essentially
more degraded than a drunken man. This in spite of popular
belief. A nymphomaniac is not essentially more degraded than a
brothel-haunting male. It may be true that moral sense decays
more quickly in a woman than in a man, that the sex-ridden or
drink-avid woman touches the deeps of degradation more quickly,
but the reasons for this are patent. They are economic reasons
usually, and physical, and not adherent to any inevitably weaker
moral fibre in the woman.

Women as a rule have less command of money than men. If they
earn what they spend they generally have to seek their
satisfactions cheaply; and, of course, since their powers of
resistance to the debilitating effects of alcohol are commonly