All women are not always lovely, and the wild women never are. As political firebrands and moral insurgents they are 'specially distasteful, warring as they do against the best traditions, the holiest functions, and the sweetest qualities of their sex. Like certain 'sports ’ which develop hybrid characteristics, these insurgent wild women are in a sense unnatural. They have not ‘bred true' — not according to the general lines on which the normal woman is constructed. There is in them a curious inversion of sex, which does not necessarily appear in the body, but is evident enough in the mind. Quite as disagreeable as the bearded chin, the bass voice, flat chest, and lean hips of a woman who has physically failed in her rightful development, the unfeminine ways and works of the wild women of politics and morals are even worse for the world in which they live. Their disdain is for the duties and limitations imposed on them by nature, their desire as impossible as that of the moth for the star. Marriage, in its old-fashioned aspect as the union of two lives, they repudiate as a one-sided tyranny; and maternity, for which, after all, women primarily exist, they regard as degradation. Their idea of freedom is their own preponderance, so that they shall do all they wish to do without let or hindrance from outside regulations or the restraints of self-discipline; their idea of morality, that men shall do nothing they choose to disallow. Their grand aim is to directly influence imperial politics, while they, and those men who uphold them, desire to shake off their own peculiar responsibilities.

Such as they are, they attract more attention than perhaps they deserve, for we believe that the great bulk of Englishwomen are absolutely sound at heart, and in no wise tainted with this pernicious craze. Yet, as young people are apt to be caught by declamation, and as false principles know how to present themselves in specious paraphrases, it is not waste of time to treat the preposterous claims put forth by the wild women as if they were really serious — as if this little knot of noisy Maenads did really threaten the stability of society and the well-being of the race.

Be it pleasant or unpleasant, it is none the less an absolute truth — the raison d'etre of a woman is maternity. For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man, and built her up cell by cell and organ by organ. The continuance of the race in healthy reproduction, together with the fit nourishment and care of the young after birth, is the ultimate end of woman as such ; and whatever tells against these functions, and reduces either her power or her perfectness, is an offence against nature and a wrong done to society. If she chooses to decline her natural office altogether, and to dedicate to other services a life which has no sympathy with the sex of humanity, that comes into her lawful list of preferences and discords. But neither then nor while she is one with the rest, a wife and mother like others, is she free to blaspheme her assigned functions ; nor to teach the young to blaspheme them ; nor yet to set afoot such undertakings as shall militate against the healthy performance of her first great natural duty and her first great social obligation.

The cradle lies across the door of the polling-booth and bars the way to the senate. We can conceive nothing more disastrous to a woman in any stage of maternity, expectant or accomplished, than the heated passions and turmoil of a political content ; for we may put out of court three fallacies — that the vote, if obtained at all, is to be confined to widows and spinsters only ; that enfranchised women will content themselves with the vote and not seek after active office ; and that they will bring into the world of politics the sweetness and light claimed for them by their adherents, and not, on the contrary, add their own shriller excitement to the men’s deeper passions. Nor must we forget that the franchise for women would not simply allow a few well-conducted, well-educated, self-respecting gentlewomen to quietly record their predilection for Liberalism or Conservatism, but would let in the far wider flood of the uneducated, the unrestrained, the irrational and emotional — those who know nothing and imagine all — those whose presence and partisanship on all public questions madden already excited men. We have no right to suppose that human nature is to be changed for our benefit, and that the influence of sex is to become a dead letter because certain among us wish it so. What has been will be again. In the mirror of the prophet, which hangs behind him, the Parisian woman of the Revolution will he repeated wherever analogous conditions exist; and to admit women into active participation in politics will certainly be to increase dis- order and add fuel to the fire of strife.

We live by our ideals. Individually they may fall into the dust of disappointment, and the flower of poetic fancy may wither away into the dry grasp of disillusion. Nevertheless the race goes on cherishing its ideals, without which, indeed, life would become too hard and sordid for us all. And one of these ideals in all Western countries is the home. Home means peace. It means, too, love. Perhaps the two are, synonymous. In the normal division of labour the man has the outside work to do, from governing the country to tilling the soil ; the woman takes the inside, managing the family and regulating society. The more highly civilised a community is the more completely differentiated are these two functions. In the lower strata of society the women work in the fields with the men ; but as yet we have not had handsome young lady comets in? the army, nor stalwart gentlemen occupied with the week’s wash and Mary- maid’s demands for Turk’s heads and house-flannels.

Part of this ideal of home is the rest it gives the man when he returns to it after a hard day’s work in the open — a hard day’s struggle in the arena. Here his thoughts drift into a smoother channel, his affections have their full outlet, and to his wife and children he brings as much happiness as he receives. The darker passions which the contests of life arouse are shut out ; the sweeter influences of the family, the calmer interests of the intellect, the pleasures of art and society remain. We are speaking of the ideal, to which we all in some sort aspire, and in which we believe — for others if not for ourselves. When we have come, to think of it as mere moonshine we have achieved our own spiritual death; when we have acted and legislated as if it were moonshine we have decreed our national degradation.

But where will be the peace of home when women, like men, plunge into the troubled sea of active political life ? Causes of disunion enough and to spare exist in modem marriage. We need not add to them. More especially we need not add to them by introducing a new and quite unnecessary wedge into brittle material of which highly strained nerves and highly developed tastes, with complexity of personal interests, have already destroyed the old cohesive quality. Imagine the home to which a weary man of business, and an ardent politician to boot, will return when his wife has promised her vote to the other side, and the house is divided against itself in very truth. Not all husbands and wives wear the same badge, and we all know miserable cases where the wife has gone directly and publicly counter to the husband. If these things are done in the green tree of restricted political action, what would happen in the dry of active political power ? Women are both more extreme and more impressible than men, and the spirit which made weak girls into heroines and martyrs, honest women into the yelling tricoteuses of those blood-stained saturnalia of ’92, still exists in the sex; and among ourselves as elsewhere.

The dissension that the exercise of this political right would bring into the home is as certain as to-morrow’s sunrise. Those who refuse to see this are of the race of the wilfully blind, or of that smaller sect of enthusiasts who believe in a problematical better rather than an established good. It is also part and parcel of the temper which desires looseness of family ties and extreme facility for divorce Of the wild women who make this disordering propaganda many are still Christians in some form or another— some believing that Christ was the actual living God Incarnate, others that He was a messenger from God, divinely inspired and directly appointed to teach men the way of holy living. And of His (the Master’s) utterances none is more emphatic than this on marriage : 'He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.’ Of His doctrine, nothing is more strenuously insisted on than the sweet and patient self-control which in non-essentials we call courtesy and in higher matters humility, patience, unselfishness, love. How do the women who still call themselves Christians reconcile the two positions ? How can they ( in one breath exalt the character and the mission of Christ, and in the next deride the essential meaning of His teaching ? The frank agnostic may prefer to begin from the beginning, and to examine the whole structure of society as a simple matter of evolution and experience ; but these wild women are not all frank agnostics ; they are rather of that curious family which thinks , to hold with the hare and hunt with the hounds, changing sides according to fancy and the exigencies of the moment. But the demand for these political rights, which would prove true dragons’ teeth granted, is, of all modern things, the most anti-Christian that can be named — the most destructive of home peace and conjugal union, of family solidarity and personal love.

In this last word lies the core and kernel of the whole question. This clamour for political rights is woman’s confession of sexual enmity. Gloss over it as we may, it comes to this in the end. No woman who loves her husband would wish to usurp his province. It is only those whose instincts are inverted, or whose anti-sexual vanity is insatiable, who would take the political reins from the strong hands which have always held them to give them to others — weaker, less capable, and wholly unaccustomed. To women who love, their 'desire is to their husbands ’ ; and the feeling remains as an echo in the soul when even the master voice is silent. Amongst our most renowned women are some who say with their whole heart, 'I would rather have been the wife of a great man, or the mother of a hero, than what I am — famous in my own person.’ A woman’s own fame is barren. It begins and ends with herself. Reflected from her husband or her son, it has in it the glory of immortality — of continuance. Sex is in circumstance as well as in body and in mind. We date from our fathers, not our mothers ; and the shield they won by valour counts to us still for honour. But the miserable little mannikin who creeps to obscurity, overshadowed by his wife’s glory, is as pitiful in history as contemptible in fact, ‘ The husband of his wife' is no title to honour ; and the best and dearest of our famous women take care that this shall not be said of them and theirs. The wild women, on the contrary, burke their husbands altogether; and even when they are not widows act as if they were.

The young who are wavering between the rampant individualism taught by the insurgent sect and the sweeter, dearer, tenderer emotions of the true woman would do well to ponder on this position. They cannot be on both sides at once. Politics or peace, the platform or the home, individualism or love, moral sterility or the rich and full and precious life of the nature we call womanly — married or single, still essentially womanly — they must take their choice which it shall be. They cannot have both. Nor can they have the ruder, rougher 'privileges’ they desire in this identity of condition with man, and retain the chivalrous devotion, the admiration, and the respect of men. These are born of the very differences between the sexes. If men want the support of equality in friendship, they find that in each other; if they want the spiritual purification which goes with true and lofty love, they look for that in women. When women have become minor men they will have lost their own holding and not have gained that other.

It may be said that certain men support this movement, of whom some may be poor creatures, but others are manly and chivalrous enough. But where was the movement yet that had not its apostles together with its camp followers ? Among the small section of men who uphold this new heresy many have that large carelessness of good-nature, that indifference of self-confidence, which makes the giant submit to the dwarf. 'It pleases them and does not hurt us,’ they say. 'If women want the suffrage give it to them in Heaven’s name. We shall always be the stronger, whether or no.’ Others go in for the unworkable theory of abstract justice, independent of general expediency ; and the third lot consists of those effeminated worshippers who wrap themselves round in the trailing skirts of the idol and shout for her rights, because they are not virile enough to respect their own. These are specially the men who uphold the imposture of the New Morality, which may be translated into prurience for the one part, and jealousy for the other.

The one unanswerable objection to the direct political power of woman is that grim blood-tax which they cannot pay and men must. The State can call on any man to serve under arms if need be, and that need might easily be brought about by a war voted by those who are themselves exempt from its personal consequences. It is mere 'havers,’ as the Scotch say, to hold that women would necessarily be on the side of peace. Some of the worst wars with which Europe has been afflicted have been brought about by women. Was Madame de Maintenon the advocate for peace ? Had the Empress Eugenie no part in that delirious cry ‘ A Berlin !' which cost so much blood and treasure ? Are there no Nihilists, preaching assassination and wholesale murder, to be found among young and beautiful Russian women? From the days of Judith onwards to our own has the world ever wanted for women with hearts of fire and wrists of steel burning to avenge and self-consecrated to strike ? More hysterical and still more easily excited than the mob proper, a crowd of women can be stirred by passionate appeals as willow leaves are stirred by the wind. True moutons de Panurge , they will follow their leader, foreseeing no consequences, conscious of no danger ; and peace would be no more assured under the monstrous regimen of women than it is now. The men, however, would have to do the work which the women had cut out, and the blood-tax would be voted by those who had naught to contribute. For we put aside the childish argument, ‘We send our husbands and sons,’ as unworthy of serious consideration. Nor is that other answer which is meant to be parallel, ‘ We run as much risk in childbed as you do in battle,’ of more validity. It is not women only who have family ties and personal affections. The men who fall leave men as well as women to mourn them ; and women need not, if they do not wish, bear children at all. Each individual man is obliged to fight if called on by the State ; no individual woman need be a wife or mother if she does not like.

Such political women as the world has seen have not all been desirable. Some have earned the blue riband of renown ; but these have been women who have influenced, not ruled. The charm and grandeur of Aspasia still illumine the historic past and vivify the dead pages ; but en revanche the silly pretensions of those Athenian woman’s rights women who, under Praxagora, were going to make a new law and a new human nature, are in a manner archetypal of all that has come after. In France, where women have always had supreme influence, so that the very blood and marrow of the nation are feminine — not effeminate — the political woman has been for the most part disastrous. Some bright exceptions shine out on the other side. Agnes Sorel, like Aspasia, was one of the rare instances in hi6toiy where failure in chastity did not include moral degradation nor unpatriotic self-consideration ; and Joan of Arc is still a symbol far all to reverence. But of the crowd of queens and mistresses and grandes dames who held the strings and made kings and statesmen dance as they listed, there is scarcely one whose work was beneficent. Even Madame Roland did more harm than good when she undertook the manipulation of forces too strong for her control, too vast for her comprehension. Had there been less of the feminine element in those cataclysmic days perhaps things would not have reached the extremes they did. Had Louis had Marie Antoinette’s energy, and Marie Antoinette Louis’s supineness, the whole story of the Reign of Terror, Marat, Charlotte Corday, and , Napoleon might never have been written. By the very nature of things, by the inherent qualities of their sex — its virtues, defects, necessities — women are at once tyrannical and individual. In America, when they get the upper hand, they wreck the grog-shops a and forbid the sale of all liquor whatever. And these women who thus destroy a man’s property and ruin his fortunes in their zeal for sobriety may saturate themselves with tea, ether, or chloral, to the destruction of their health and nerves. They may resort to all sorts of perilous experiments to prevent unwelcome results ; - but these are their own affairs and the men have no right to interfere.

This tyrannous temper is part of the maternal instinct which women have inherited for such countless generations. No authority in the world is so absolute, so irresponsible, as that of a mother over her young children. She can make or mar them, physically and morally, as she will — as she thinks best? Even in the most highly civilised communities, where the laws are strictest and most vigilant, she can, if she so chooses, doom them to death by her bad management, or educate them on such false lines as lead to moral depravity. By the depth and strength of the maternal instinct is the race preserved, and by this alone; and the absolute authority of the mother is the child’s safest shield.

But this very characteristic is fatal to political life, to generalised justice, to the suppression of sections for the good of the whole. The political woman repudiates all this as so much paltering with the Evil One. The general good is nowhere when compared with partial inconveniences. We have seen this notably exemplified in our own generation, when excited partisanship put its hand to the plough, rooting out wise legislation on the one hand and sowing poisonous immunities on the other. And so it will ever be with women while they retain their distinctive womanly qualities.

If we imagine for a moment what the woman’s vote would give, and what it would do, we shall see the inherent absurdity of the proposal. To begin with, the confining of the vote to the husbandless is, as we have said, an impossibility. If it is a right conferred by citizenhood, property, and taxation, why should marriage carry with it the penalty of disfranchisement? The Married Woman’s Property Act and the fact that a wife is the mistress of her own property, however acquired or conditioned, reduces this disfranchisement to an injustice as well as an absurdity. Nor, as was said, can the vote be confined to the capable and educated. All the little country shopkeepers and workwomen who know nothing beyond the curate, the church, the school feast, and the last new local baby ; the laundress who cannot manage her unruly half-dozen hands ; the rollicking landlady. who would give her vote dead sure to the jolly candidate who drank his bottle like a man and paid for it like a prince ; the widow with no more know, ledge of men and life than to keep her boy like a little girl tied to her apron-string ; the lodger with her doubtful antecedents and loss doubtful profession ; all .the good, weak, innocent women who know no more of politics then so many doves in a cage ; all the wild, excited, unreasoning women who think that vice and virtue, misery and prosperity, anew human nature and a new political economy can be made by Act of Parliament — all these sending the majority to decide on taxes, wars, treaties, international questions of difficulty and delicacy ! — all these directly influencing the imperial policy of our grand old country ! And the men who stand by, tongue in cheek, laughing at the sorry farce they do. not take the trouble to check, or who, woman-lovers to the point of self-absorption and Sexual idolatry, beliete, with the women themselves, that this preponderance will really be the beginning of a new era in national virtue! And all the while these wild women and their backers shut their eyes to the contempt with which Other nations would regard us. Even France, for all her feminine qualities, has not done so mad a thing as this. Even France has not proposed to enfranchise her lionnea and lorettez — to admit into the Senate the direct personal power of the courtesan. It is reserved for England — the -fad-ridden England of these later days — to hear in her Parliament this proposal to be hag- ridden ; for that simply what it would come to. The womanly women would retire or be pushed aside by the wild women, the small but noisy section which there is yet time to ignore or to suppress.

Doubtless there are few women of anything like energy or brain power who have not felt in their own souls the ardent longing for a freer hand in life. Men as a race are the stronger and the more capable, but every man is not every woman’s superior ; and women of character do not find their masters at all street comers. But if they have common sense and are able to judge of general questions, and not only of individuals, they know that to upset present political conditions for the admission of a few exceptions would be a& disastrous to the well-being of society as to obliterate all other distinctions of sex.

This question of woman’s political power is from beginning to end a question of sex, and all that depends on sex — its moral and intellectual limitations, its emotional excesses, its personal disabilities, its social conditions. It is a question of science, as purely as the best hygienic conditions or the accurate understanding of physiology. And science is dead against it. Science knows that to admit women — that is, mothers — into the heated arena of political life would be as destructive to the physical well-being of the future generation as it would be disastrous to the good conduct of affairs in the present. And social science echoes the same thing in all that regards wives •and mistresses of honest families. As for the self-complacent argument that women would moralise politics, can anyone point outanywhere a race of women who are superior to their conditions? What is it that gives women their peculiar moral power over men but the greater purity born of their greater ignorance — their daintier refinement, because of their more restricted lives ? Frankly, do young men respect most the young women who have read Juvenal and Fetronius and those other classics of which their mothers, God bless them ! did not know even the names, or those others whose innocent eyes have never yet been darkened or hardened by a know- ledge of the shameful sins of life ? When women have all in common with men will they retain aught of their distinctive beauty ? Where do we find that they do ? Are the women at the gin-shop bar better than the men at the gin-shop door — the field hands in sun-bonnets more satisfactory than those in brimless hats? If women are in- truded into the political world with all its angry partisanship and eagerness for victory, how can they retain the ideal qualities which they have gained by a certain amotfnt of sequestration from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife? Are they alone, of all created things, uninfluenced by their environment, incapable of reversion to the lower original type ? We may be sure that the world has done well for itself in the distinctions of habit that it has made in all ways between the sexes, and that those who wotild throw down the barriers are letting in the flood. But ‘ apres nous le deluge ! ’ The wild women who would scramble for the sceptre of political sovereignty have no great regard for the future or anything else but themselves. Let us enjoy, no matter who suffers ; crucify the old ideal, and let our children run the risk.

These words lead us back to the centre of the moral objections against the active political woman. It may be that the Christian ideal, the Christian doctrine, is a myth and a dream from start to finish. Be it so; but if so, let it be acknowledged. If indeed those sweet and lovely virtues of patience and unselfishness are follies, let the world confess it and make no more pretence to the contrary. If, however, they still have any significance, and are held by many as of divine authority, it seems rather self-contradictoiy that the half of the race which can best practise them refuses to do so, and would lay the burden on the shoulders of those to whom they are not always either righteous or possible. A fighter cannot be non- resisting ; but we need not all be fighters, men and women indiscriminately. The gentle response of the Jewish women to the men’s prouder boast of their material advantages has always seemed to os to carry in it the very soul of womanly sweetness. ‘We thank Thee, 0 Lord God, that Thou hast made us according to Thy will.’

Well! whether it be according to the directly spoken will of God, or according to the mysterious law of evolution, working we know not whence, tending we know not whither — let it be by religion or by nature, society or science — there stands the fact for square, the grand fundamental fact of humanity, difference of sex, and consequent difference of functions, virtues, qualities, and qualifications. As little as it is fitting for a man to look after the pep boat and the house linen, so is it for women to assume the political power of the State. Our men are not yet at such a low ebb in brains or morals as to need dispossession ; nor, pace our platform orators, are the wild women, though undeniably smart, of such oomupnding intelligence as to create a new epoch and justify a new social ordering.

By the grace of good luck the question has been shelved for the present jsession, but the future is ahead. And as, Unfortunately, certain of the Conservative party coquet with the Woman’s vote, believing that. they shall thus tap a large Conservative reservoir, we are by no means clear of the danger. What we would wish to do is to convince the young and dndetermined that political work is both unwomanly and unnatural; self-destructive and socially hurtful; the sure precursor to the loss of men’s personal consideration and to the letting loose the waters of strife ; and— what egotism will not regard— the sure precursor to a future regime of redoubled coercion and suppression.

For, after all, tie strong right arm is the ultima ratio, and God will have it so; and when men found, as they would, that they were outnumbered, outvoted, and politically nullified, they would soon have recourse to that ultimate appeal— and the last state of women would be worse than their first.

E. Lynn Linton.

We must change our ideals. The Desdemoflas and Dorotheas, the* Enids and Imogens, are all wrong. Milton's Eve is an anachronism ; so is the Lady ; so is Una ; so are Christ abel and Genevieve. Such women as Panthea and Alcestis, Cornelia and Lueretia, are as much out of date as the chiton and the peplum, the bride's hair juirted with a spfear, or the worth of a woman reckoned by the flax she spun and the thread she wove, by the number of citizens ^hega\e to the State, and the honour that reflected on her through the heroism of her sons. All this is past and done with — effete, rococo, dead. For the tacens et placens uxor ' of old-time dream?* we must acknowledge now as our Lady of De^re the masterful domina of real life— that loud and dictatorial person, insurgent and something more, who suffers no- one’s opinion to influence her mind, no venerable law hallowed by time, nor custom consecrated by experience, to control her actions. Mistress of herself, the Wild Woman as a social insurgent preaches the lesson of liberty ' broadened into lawlessness and licence y, Unconsciously she exemplifies how beauty can degenerate into ugliness, and shows how the once fragrant flower, run to seed, is good for neither food nor ornament.

Her ideal of life for herself is absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men. She repudiates the doctrine of individual conformity for the sake of the general good; holding the self-restraint involved as an act of slavishness of which no woman worth her salt would be guilty. She makes between the sexes no distinctions, moral or aesthetic, nor even personal; but holds that what is lawful to the one is permissible to the other. Why should the world have parcelled out qualities or habits into two different sections, leaving only a few common to both alike ? Why, for instance, should men have the fee-simple of courage, and women that of modesty ? tp • men be given the right of the initiative — to women only that of selection ? to men the freer indulgence of the senses — to women the master discipline of self-denial ? The Wild Woman of modem life- asks why ; and she answers the question in her own way. Rien n’est sacre pour un sapeur/ Nothing is forbidden to the Wild. Woman as a social insurgent ; for the one word that she cannot spellis, Fitness. Devoid of this sense of fitness, she does all manner of things which she thinks bestow on her the power, together with the privileges, of a man; not thinking that in obliterating the finer distinctions of sex she is obliterating the finer traits of civilisation, and that every step made towards identity of habits is a step downwards in refine- ment and delicacy — wherein lies the essential core of civilisation. She smokes after dinner with the men ; in railway carriages ; in public rooms — when she is allowed. She thinks she is thereby vindicating her independence and honouring her emancipated womanhood. Heaven bless her ! Down in Ike North-country villages, and elsewhere, she will find her prototypes calmly smoking their black cutty-pipes, with no sense of shame about them. Why should they not? These ancient dames with ‘ whiskin’ beards about their mou’s,’ withered and unsightly, worn out, and no longer women in desirableness or beauty — why should they not take to the habits of men ? They do not dis- gust, because they no longer charm ; but even in these places you do not find the younger women with cutty-pipes between their 'lips. Perhaps in the coal districts, where women work like men and with inen, and are dressed a men. you will see pipes as well as hear blasphemies ; but that is surely not an admirable state of things, and one can hardly say that the pit -brow women, excellent persons and good workers as they are in their own way. are exactly the glasses in which our fine ladies find their loveliest fashions — the moulds wherein they would do well to run their own forms. And when, after dinner, our young married women and husbandless girls, despising the old distinctions and trampling under foot the time-honoured conventions of former generation, ‘light up’ with the men, they are simply assimilating themselves to this old Sally and that ancient Betty down in the dales and mountain hamlets; or to the stalwart cohort of pit- brow women for whom sex has no aesthetic distinctions. We grant the difference of method. A superbly dressed young woman, bust, arms, and shoulders bare, and gleaming white and warm beneath the subdued light of a luxurious dinner-table — a beautiful young creature, painted, dyed, and powdered according to the mode — her lips red with wine and 'moist with liqueur — she is really different from mumping old Betty in unwomanly rags smoking at her black cutty-pipe by the cottage door on the bleak fell-side. In the one lies an appeal to the passions of men ; in the other is the death of all emotion. Nevertheless, the acts are the same, the circumstances which accompany them alone being different.

Free-traders in all that relates to sex, the Wild Women allow men no monopoly in sports, in games, in responsibilities. Beginning by ‘ walking with the guns/ they end by shooting with them ; and some have made the moor a good training-ground for the jungle. As life is constituted, it is necessary to have butchers and sportsmen. The hunter's instinct keeps down the wild beasts, and those who go after big game do as much good to the world as those who slaughter home-bred beasts for the market. But in neither instance do we care to see a woman’s hand. It may be merely a sentiment, and ridiculous at that; still, sentiment has its influence, legitimate enough when not too widely extended ; and we confess that the image of a ‘ hutching ’ woman, nursing her infant child with hands red with the blood of an ox she has just poleaxed or of a lamb whose throat she has this instant cut, is one of unmitigated horror and moral incongruity. Precisely as horrible, as incongruous, is the image of a well-bred sportswoman whose bullet has crashed along the spine of a leopardess, who has knocked over a rabbit or brought down a part- ridge. The one may be a liard-fibted womaif of the people, who had no inherent sensitiveness to overcome — a woman born and bred among the shambles and accustomed to the whole thing from childhood. The other may be a dainty-featured aristocrat, whose later development belies her early training; but the result is the same in both cases — the possession of an absolutely unwomanly instinct, an absolutely unwomanly indifference to death and suffering; which certain of the Wild Women of the present day cultivate as one of their pro- tests against the limitations of sex. The viragoes of all times have always had this same instinct, this same indifference. For nothing of all this is new in substance. What is new is the translation into the cultured classes of certain qualities and practices hitherto confined to the uncultured and — savages.

This desire to assimilate their lives to those of men runs through the whole day's work of the Wild Women. Not content with croquet and lawn tennis, the one of which affords ample opportunities for' flirting — foi; the Wild Women are not always above that little pastime — and the other for exercise even more violent than is good for the average woman, they have taken to golf and cricket, where they are hindrances for the one part, and make themselves ‘ sights’ for the other. Men are not graceful when jumping, running, stooping, swinging their arms, and all the rest of it. They are fine, and give a sense of power that is perhaps more attractive than mere beauty; but, as schoolboys are not taught gymnastics after the manner of the young Greeks, to the rhythmic cadence of music, so that every movement maybe rendered automatically graceful, they are often awkward enough when at play ; and the harder the work the less there is of artistic beauty in the manner of it . But if men, with their narrower hips and broader shoulders, are less than classically lovely when they are putting out their physical powers, what are the women, whose broad hips give a wider step and less steady carriage in running, and whose arms, because of their narrower shoulders, do not lend them- selves to beautiful curves when they are making" a swinging stroke at golf or batting and bowling at cricket ? The prettiest woman in the world loses her .beauty when at these violent exercises. Hot and damp, mopping her flushed and streaming face with her handkerchief, she has lost that sense of repose, that delicate self-restraint, which belongs to the ideal woman. She is no longer dainty. She has thrown off her grace and abandoned all that makes her lovely for the uncomely roughness of pastimes wherein she cannot excel, and of which it was never intended she should be a partaker.

We have not yet heard of women polo-players ; but that will come. In the absurd endeavour to be like men, these modem homaases will leave nothing untried; and polo-playing, tent-pegging and tilting at the quintain are all sure to come in time. When weeds once begin to grow, no limits can be put to their extent unless they are stubbed up betimes.'

The Wild Women, in their character of social insurgents, are bound by none of the conventions which once regulated society. In them we see the odd social phenomenon of the voluntary descent of the higher to the lower forms of ways and works. 4 Unladylike ’ is a term that has ceased to be significant Where c unwomanly ’ has died out we could scarcely expect this other to survive. The special must needs go with the generic ; and we find it so with a vengeance! With other queer inverrdons the frantio desire of making money has invaded the whole clas> of Wild Woman ; and it does not mitigate theft desire that, as things are. they have enough for all reasonable wants. Women who, a few years ago, would not have shaken hands with a dressmaker, still less have sat down to table with her, now open shops and set up in business on their own account — not because they are poor, which would he an honourable and sufficing reason enough, but because they an* restless, dissatisfied, insurgent, and like nothing so much as to shock established prejudices and make the folk stare. It is such a satire on their inheritance of class distinction, on their superior education — perhaps very superior, stretching out to academical proportions ! It is just the kind of topsy- turvydom that pleases them. They, with their long descent, grand name, and right to a coat-of-arms which represents past ages of renown, — they to come dowm into the market-place, shouldering out the meaner fry, who must work to live — taking from the legitimate traders the pick of their custom, and making their way by dint of social standing and personal influence — they to sell bonnets in place of buying them — to make money instead of spending it — what fun ! What a grand idea it was to conceive, and grander still to execute ! In this insurgent playing at shopkeeping by those who do not need to do so we see nothing grand nor beautiful, but much that is thought- less and mean. Born of restlessness and idleness, these spasmodic make-believes after serious work are simply pastimes to the Wild Women who undertake them. There is nothing really solid in them, no more than there was of philanthropy in the fashionable craze far slumming which broke out like a fever a winter or two ago. Shopkeeping and slumming, and some other things too, are just the ex- pression of that restlessness which makes of the modem Wild Woman a second I o, driving *her afield in search of strange pleasures and novel occupations, and leading her to drink of the muddiest waters so long as they are in new channels cut off from the old fountains. Nothing daunts this modem Io. No barriers restrain, no obstacles prevent. She appears on the public stage and executes dances which one would not like one's * daughter to see, still less perform. She herself knows no shame in showing her skill — and her legs. Why should she? What free and independent spirit, in these later days, is willing to be bound by those musty principles of modesty which did well enough for our stupid old great-grandmothers — but for us? Other times, other manners ; and womanly reticence is not of these last !

There is no reason why perfectly good and modest women should not be actresses. Rightly taken, acting is an art as noble a< any other. But here, as elsewhere, are gradations and section ; and jn^t as a wide line is drawn between the cancan and the minuet, so is therebetween the things which a modest woman may do on the stage and those which she may not. Not long ago that line was notoriously over- stepped, and certain of our Wild Women pranced gaily from the safe precincts of the permissible into those wider regions of the more than doubtful, where, it is to be supposed, they enjoyed their (jue^tionable triumph — at least for the hour.

The spirit of the day is both vagrant and self-advertising, both bold and restless, contemptuous of law and disregarding restraint. We do not suppose that women are intrinsically le*^ \iituous than they were in the time of Hogarth’s - Last Stake;’ but they are more dissatisfied, less occupied, and infinitely less modest. All those old similes about modest violets and charfe lilies, flowers blooming unseen, and roses that 4 open their glowing bosonic ’ but to one love only — all these are as rococo as the Elizabethan ruff or Queen Anne’s ‘ laced head.’ Everyone who has a 4 gift 5 must make that gift public ; and, so far from wrapping up talents in a napkin, pence are put out to interest, and the world is called on to admire the milling. The enormous amount of inferior work which is thrown on the market in all directions is one of the marvels of the time. Everything is exhibited. If a young lady can draw so far correctly as to give her cow four legs and not five, she sends her sketches to some newspaper, or more boldly transfers them on to a plate or a pot, and exhibits them at some art refuge for the stage below mediocrity. It is heartbreaking when these inanities are sent by those poor young creatures who need the fortune they think they have in their 4 gift/ It is contemptible when they are sent by the rich, distracted with vanity and idleness together. The love of art for its own sake, of intellectual work for the intellectual pleasure it brings, knows nothing of this insatiatevanity, this restless ambition to be classed among those who give to their work days where these others give hours. It is only the Wild Women who take these headers into artistic depths, where they flounder pitiably, neither dredging up unknown treasures, nor floating gaily in the sun on the crest of the wave. When we think of the length of tiipe it has taken to create all masterpieces — and, indeed, all good work* of any kind, not necessarily masterpieces — it is food for wonder to see the jaunty ease with which the scarce-educated in an art throw off their productions, which then they fling out to the public as one tosses crumbs to the sparrow's. But the Wild Women are never thorough. As artists, as literati, as tradeswomen, as philanthropists, it i? all a mere touch-and-go kind of thing with them. The roots, which are first in importance in all growths, no matter what, are the last things they care to master. They would not be wild if they did. •

About tlie.se Wild Women is always an unpleasant suggestion of the ad\cnturess. Whatever their natural place and lineage, they are of the same family as those hotel heroines who forget to lock the chamber door — those confiding innocents of ripe years, who contract imperfect marriages — those pretty country blossoms who begin life modestly and creditably, and go on to flaunting notoriety and disgrace. Ono* feel> that it is only the accident of birth which differences these from those, and determine a certain stability of class. It is John Bradshaw o\ er again ; but t lie ‘ grace ’ is queerly bestowed. As a rule, th women have no .scruple:* about money. They are notorious for never having small change: they get into debt with a facility’ as amazing in its want of conscience as its want of foresight; and then they take to strange way for redeeming their credit and saving themselves from public exposure. If the secret history of some account -hooks could be written startling revelations would be made. Every now and then, indeed, thiags come to light which it would have been better to keep hidden : for close association with shady ‘pro- moters’ and confessed blacklegs is not conducive to the honour of womanhood — at least as this honour was. Under the new regime blots do not count for so much. Every now and then, one, a trifle more shameless than h.er sisters, flourishes out openly before the world as an adept in a doubtful business — say, in the art of laying odds judiciously and hedging wisely. She is to be seen standing on her tub shouting with the best ; and as little abashed by the unwomanliness of her environment ’ as are her more mischievous compeers on the political stump. She knows that money is to be made as well as lost in the ring, and she does not see why, because she is a woman, she may not pick out plums with the rest.

If she has money enough — she is sure to call it 4 oof/ so as to be in line with the verbal as well as the practical blackguardism of the day — she has a stud of her own, and enters into all the details connected therewith with as much gusto as a village beldame enters into the life-events of her homely world. But while a foal is one of the most interesting things in life to one of these horsy Wild Women, a child is one of the least ; and what young mother, with all the hopes and fears, the fervent love, the brilliant dreamy, which lie about the cradle of her first-born, comes near in importance to that broodmare of racing renown, with her long-legged foal trotting by her $ide ? The Wild Woman is never a delightful creature, take her how one will ; but the horsy Wild Woman, full of stable slang and inverted instincts, can give points to the rest of her clan, and still be ahead of them all.

Sometimes our Wild Women break out ah adventurous travellers ; when they come home to write on what they have seen and done, books which have to be taken with salt by the spoonful, not only by the grain. Their bows tire very large, and the string they draw preternaturally long. Experts contradict them, and the more experienced smile and shake their heads. But their own partisans uphold them; and that portion of the press where reason and manliness are suffocated by the tense of sex takes them as if they were so many problems of Euclid w it h Q.E.l). after the end/ How different these pseudo-heroines arc from the quiet realities, such as Marianne North, to name no other, who did man els of which they never boasted, contented with showing the unanswerable results! They covered down , 5 they did not paint in high lights and exaggerated colours the various perils through which they had passed. The Wild Woman of the * immediate day reverses the s\ st cm. ITitler'lier manipulation a steep ascent is a sheer precipice, a crack in the road is a crevasse, a practicable bit of crag-climbing is a sen ice of pci il w here each step is planted in the shadow of death ; and hardships aie encountered which exiat only on paper and in the fertile imagination of the fair tourist. If, however, these hardships are real and not imaginary, the poor, w T ild \agrant returns broken and overstrained, and finds, when perhaps too late, that lovely woman may stoop to other folly besides that of listening to a dear loo’edlad; and that, in her attempt to imitate, to rival, perhaps to surpass, man on his rightful ground she is not only destroying her distinctive charm of womanhood, but is perhaps digging her own grave, to be filled too surely as well as prematurely.

We are becoming a little surfeited with these Wild Women as globe-trotters and travellers. Their adventures, which for the most part are fictions based on a very small substratum of fact, have ceased to impress, partly because we ha\e ceased to believe, and certainly ceased to respect. Que diable allait-'U faire dans cette galbre f Who wanted them to run all these risks, supposing them to be true? What good have they done by their days of starvation and nights of sleeplessness ? their perils by land and sea ? their chances of being devoured by wild beasts or stuck up by bushrangers? taken by brigands or insulted by rowdies of all nations? They have contributed nothing to our stock of knowledge, as, Marianne North has done. They have solved no ethnological problem ; brought to light no new treasures of nature; discovered no new field for British spades to till, no neiy markets for British manufactures to supply. They have done nothing but lose their beauty, if they had any ; for what went* out fresh and comely comes back haggard and weather- beaten. It was quite unnecessary. They have lost, but the world has not gained ; and that doctor’s bill will make a hole in the publisher’s cheque.

Ranged side by side with these vagrant Wild Women, globe- trotting for the sake of «a subsequent book of travels, and the kudos with the pence accruing, are those who spread themselves abroad as missionaries, and those — a small minority, certainly — who do not see why the army and the navy should be sealed against the sex. Among these female missionaries are some who are good, devoted, pure- hearted, self-sacrificing — all that women should be, all that the best women are, and ever have been, and ever will be. But also among them are the Wild Women — creatures impatient of restraint, bound by no law, insurgent to their finger-tip*, and desirous of making all other women as restless and discontented as themselves. Ignorant and unreasonable, they would carry into the sun-laden East the social conditions born of the icy winds of the North. They would introduce into the zenana the circumstances of a Yorkshire home. In a country where jealousy is as strong as death, ami stronger than love, they would incite the women* to revolt against the rule of seclusion, which has been the law of the land for centuries before we were a nation at all. That rule has worked well for the country, inasmuch as the chastity of Hindu women and the purity of family life are notoriously intact. But our Wild Women swarm over into India as zenana missionaries, trying to make tin* Hindus as discontented, as restless, as unruly as themsehos. The zenana would not suit us. The meekest little mouse among us would revolt at a state of things which does not press too heavily on those who have known nothing else and inherited no other traditions. But it does suit the people who have framed and who live under these laws; and we hold it to be an ethnological blunder, as well ns a political misdem^mour, to send out these surging apostles of disobedience and discontent to carry revolt and confusion among our Indian fellow-subjects. It is jiart of the terrible restlessness with which this age is afflicted, part of the contempt for law in fill its forms which certain women have adopted from certain men, themselves too effeminate, too little manly to be able to submit to discipline. These are the men who bound on the Wild Women to ever fresh extravagances. Those pestilent papers which are conducted by these rebels against law and order are responsible for a large amount of the folly which

To all movements, wise or foolish, flock the two classes of followers— the sincerely convinced and the insincerely affiliated; those who think they are helping to establish the law of righteousness on this earth, and those who see nothing but their own advantage in a general ‘ stramash,’ when they may pick up some pieces in the scramble. It has always been so, and, pending the arrival of the Millennium, always will be so. Wherefore, following the universal law, we find in the new school of Wild Women both preux chevaliers and despicable camp- followers—partisans sincerely believing in the merit of the cause to which they have devoted themselves, and partisans who, with tongue stuck into cheek, believe they can make a good thing for themselves out of it; and who but a fool thinks of aught else?

For the former of these partisans we have only moral respect in spite of strong intellectual deprecation. We think them mistaken, but we know them to be sincere. We question their taste, deplore their sympathies, and wish they could, or would, see farther ahead; but we honour their motives and confess their integrity. Still, how much soever we may respect them as individuals, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they are doing their best to bring about one of the greatest social and national disasters that could befall us. Dazzled by the rainbows in the spray, fascinated by that long shining strip in the far distance, they have determined to shoot Niagara for the problematical gain to be found—After. We who do not believe in the wisdom of shooting Niagara, and who foresee the wreck of that After, we would hold them back if we could, as we would hold back dreaming pilots and visionary engine-drivers. All the same for themselves personally, of pure intention and absolute sincerity as they are, we have only moral respect as we say, while opposing them inch by inch on the practical grounds of expediency.

As men, these sincerely convinced partisans are full of lofty theories and noble feeling. They press into the service of modern life, for womanhood in the abstract and concrete alike, the old sentiment of chivalrous devotion reserved for the lady of rank, honour, and repute. They add to this old chivalrous and circumscribed devotion that generous kind of manly toleration which holds that women should be allowed to do as they like, partly because, being so universally good, they are sure never to wish to do what they ought not—partly because, as the weaker sex, their going wrong does not really so much signify, seeing that the men being the stronger can always put things right when necessary. Or they hold that the law of abstract justice should override the wisdom of experience, and that if a thing can be proved right by algebraic formulas it is therefore practicable and imperative. These are the good men who believe in the Wild Women ; who even deny that they are wild at all; who think that all things are right or wrong in themselves, not in their application, and who thus cannot for the life of them find a sex in morals, in decencies, in habits, in spheres of action.

As women, the non-aggressive partisans of their wild sisters firmly believe in the coincidence of the reign of righteousness with the supremacy of their own sex. Sheltered and innocent, they know nothing of life as it is ; and their credulity is in exact ratio with their ignorance. When the crafty leaders tell them tales of impossible oppression of women by men, they accept things as they hear them ; and the traditional grain of salt is far to seek and unremembered. Any unprejudiced person who has attended certain women’s meetings, where the bold undertake to enlighten the timid, can testify to the astounding falsehoods given out as gospel truths—has heard the extraordinary statements offered as proved facts and swallowed whole without straining. One of these lady orators even went so far as to paraphrase clauses in Acts of Parliament which do not exist, giving facts and figures not to be found out of dreamland. The conversation of one of these good women after she has been primed by a Wild sister takes you into a kind of kingdom of the gnomes, where experience and common sense have no holding, and where life is ordered on lines different from those we know of in this world of ours beneath the moon. The wife of a man whom she loves and in whom she trusts with reason, the mother of sons of whom she is justly proud, she yet believes in a monstrous world of organised masculine iniquity which could not exist in a civilised society. To strengthen the hands of the Wild Women who terrify her imagination with their hideous fairy-tales, and who assure her that woman's suffrage and woman’s supremacy would remedy these awful evils out of hand, is therefore the same to her as strengthening the hands of justice and defending the cause of virtue. It is helping saints and martyrs against the brutal dominion of sinners and executioners.

These good women of large hearts and small experience—of insatiable credulity because of unfathomable ignorance—see no reason why the moral ideal should not be established forthwith. Their first word is; The Government ought to interfere.’ To make man moral by Act of Parliament seems to them the easiest thing in the world; and if woman had the casting vote it would be so. Do not the Wild Women assert now, as in the days of Aristophanes, that female suffrage would put right all that is now wrong, and straighten out the crooked roads everywhere ? And are not these innocents the mere echoes of those brave words ? Poor lambs! their bell-wethers are of a queer breed!

For none of those sincerely converted partisans can we find a hard word or a disrespectful thought. We look on them as dupes fatally deluded, or as zealots still more fatally mistaken; but to wish to open their eyes is not to strike them in the face. That may be reserved for the wilfully mischievous who advocate general disorder for their own advantage—the selfish wreckers who, by false lights promising safe harbourage, would bring the good ship on to the rocks, for the private gain to be had in the general loss.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about certain unworthy partisans of the Wild Women is their total want of intellectual dignity. Smart and ready, with hardihood of attack and fluency of speech, they are substantially' ignorant of all that makes a man valuable as a thinker. They know nothing from the root upwards, or the seeding which follows the flower. Their criticisms are never beyond the range of the intelligent schoolboy cocksure of himself and everything beside. Problems which are insurmountable to others they clear at a hop, skip, and a jump; and no eventuality frightens them, because they shut their eyes and will not see. The advocates of disorder, disobedience, irreverence, and the emancipation of youth from the need of guidance as well as that of woman from the burden of their duties, they are no more able than women themselves to forecast the practical results of their own theories. Like the Wild Women whose claims they advocate, they are hysterically susceptible to outside influences; they prefer emotion to reason; they champion the individual as against the law and the community; they like faith better than demonstration. All these, the characteristics of women, are the characteristics also of certain of these mentally unsexed partisans— those who applaud the Wild sort to the echo, and would give them dominion over the political as well as the social and domestic worlds.

When these partisans are men of low birth and large ambition, they are wise enough to know that the drawing-rooms of society will remain for ever shut to them unless they can open them by the magic formula of a Cause. Also they are wise enough to know that women only have the key to those closed doors. If they wish to enter, they must do so by the help of women. Men are of no good. To take up, then, the Woman’s Cause, as it is called—to advocate identity of function, occupation, responsibility with men—to flatter her vanity by preaching the supremacy of woman—to minister to her weaknesses and feed the ignorance of the sex—all this is ‘ good business ’ for those political incendiaries, who do not care whose house they burn down if they may but roast their own chestnuts in the embers. Patrons of charming young murdresses, adultresses, adventuresses, they are the vilifiers of all women who belong to the elder-fashioned school; and the very sins they condone in one who has no political standing they make inexpiable offences in those who have, if that standing is contrary to their own. Their chivalry goes no deeper than their learning, and neither is thicker than the collodion film on a photographic plate. To come to the Tartar in the Russian, you must scratch harder than is necessary to find the ruffian in the pseudo-knight of certain of these partisans. The one thing they cannot brook is opposition; and the generous allowance of differences is the large grace of God to which they cannot attain. We have only to read their utterances in their chosen organs to judge for ourselves of the small spite, the dishonest interpretation, the reckless assertion and the purely feminine habit of ‘nagging’ which pervades the whole mind and words of these partisans and echoes of the Wild Women of the day.

In politics, in morals, in taste, they are equally examples of what to avoid. Whatever tells against the dignity and integrity of our empire they advocate. They eulogise and uphold the pronounced enemies of our country. They would give the keys of our foreign possessions into the hands of Russia or of France; they brand patriotism as jingoism; and they teach all who will listen to them to break the laws, to despise our national institutions, to ridicule our national traditions, to dishonour our national flag. Cowards to pain, they prefer dishonour to war; and the price they would pay for peace would include the surrender of all that a manly people holds dear. They hate nothing so much as a resolute Government prepared to maintain the English name and prestige at all hazards ; and to turn the other cheek to the smiter costs them no effort in foreign policy.

At home they incite to insubordination, and make grievances which no one but themselves knew existed. They are like Samson’s foxes among the standing corn; and the monkeyfied lads who put iron bars across the rail for the fun of the spill have about as much sense of responsibility as they. When punishment falls on the evildoer, they fill heaven and earth with their howls for pardon and their cries of indignation against official severity. On the other hand, a mistake made by a policeman or a magistrate is treated as a crime for which hanging without benefit of clergy would be too good. The policeman and the magistrate represent law, order, the decency of restraint, the repression of individual fancy for the good of the general public; and our hysterical partisans of the Wild Women they resemble and have helped to create are dead against all these things. Their newspaper articles are prolonged screeches, and one reads them with a feeling of amazement at the profundity of the depth to which the journalistic partisan can sink.

In morality they follow on the same track. Their morals are the morals of women, not of men. The grand and heroic virtues of masculine men—like the Stoics say, when Stoicism meant self-control and public virtue- these virtues are nowhere with them, while high- falutin' fanfaronnades or noisy declamations bear away the palm. They shrink from all these Stoical virtues, call them cold and hard, materialistic and final; while indiscriminate pity, enthusiastic credulity, spiritual and religious crazes of every kind and description, or impossible philanthropy and the idealisation of masculine chastity, overshadow all the rest. How should it not be so ? Affiliated to the Wild Women and their cause, they are themselves like women in all essentials of mind and character.

But with their loud-voiced pleas for an ideal purity of life is mixed a strangely suggestive pruriency of imagination that also belongs to the role. Their advocacy of women is personal not circumstantial; and the dullest reader cannot miss the running commentary set between the lines. It is not the thing done, but the sex of the executant, which excites these lopsided admirers; and that fact of sex determines their admiration. There is a certain immodesty in the applause with which they greet anything said or done by a woman—of the kind they uphold—which revolts the sober thinker. They do not see that in this indiscriminate applause lies their confession of feminine inferiority, such as the true respecters of women, who believe in differences not identity, never make. If these hysterical partisans of the Wild Women really believed in the mental equality of the sexes, in the identity of direction and the equipoise of brain power, they would not screech so loudly over every second-rate achievement of a woman, because it was a woman who did it. Where women are confessedly equal or even superior to men, as on the stage—as actresses, dancers, singers— their sex is not paraded as part of the meed for praise. They are applauded, not because being women they have done something more or less meritorious; but because they are artists and perfect in their work. Their success is not flung as a defiance, nor used to give point to a sneer. They are supreme as workers; and no one feels that a sex victory has been gained because no one feels that there was any sex contest. The worth of the artist gains the applause, and sex does not count, save in the case of personal beauty, which naturally enhances the charm of artistic merit.

But indeed the praise of these thick and thin partisans does not count for much in the way of honour. When we see what manner of women it is they so often uphold, we may well shut their flaunting libro d'oro, and refuse our own homage to the names inscribed therein.

Nor can we agree with one of the grand points of their moral scheme—that which makes the frailty of women the sin of men-— throwing the responsibility of the fault on to the shoulders of men, rather than leaving it where it has ever been and ought to be—with the women themselves. One of the Wild sort, the other day, speaking the fit punishment of sin, maintained the now familiar thesis of men's responsibility, which would never be rightly apportioned until women had the vote. With all our heart and soul and strength we combat this, save in exceptional cases of rare turpitude. As a rule, women are responsible for themselves. While they are young and ignorant they ought to be guarded by their elders. When they are of full age and know what they are about, they have no need of protection, and are self-seduced quite as much as betrayed. Before that age of maturity and knowledge, the girl ought to be under the guardianship of her mother, or that mother’s representative. If women choose to let their young daughters run loose—if they give them the key of the fields and the liberty of the streets—if they let them live alone in lodgings, read improper books, study from the nude with young men of their own age or older—learn pathology and anatomy with young men of their own age or older,—if they allow them to fling off all allegiance to feminine restraints, all respect for authority and to be unguarded and ungoverned, they and they alone are to blame. They know the dangers of life, and from what girls ought to be protected. If they disregard the wisdom of experience, -on whose soul lies the sin ? On those whose nature it is to seek and have where they can, or on those whose duty it is to defend and deny ? Is the wolf to blame who passes through the open fence into the fold? or is it the shepherd, by whose negligence that fence is left free to the marauder—that helpless flock is left unguarded ? This attempt to fasten on men the responsibility which belongs to women is cowardly, insincere, and selfish. There may be instances where the man is alone to blame, and where he deserves to be shot for his crime, but in the large majority of cases the woman is responsible for herself, and the mother is responsible for her daughter. And we hold that this is a more wholesome apportionment than to affix the responsibility of woman’s virtue on men and take it from the women themselves. This, too, in the face of this much-desired political responsibility, which the best women do not want, and the majority would not know how to use if they had it!

The taste of these partisans is as queer as their morality and as doubtful, as their politics. If a woman does any tiling specially unfeminine and ugly, the hysterical press breaks forth into a hymn of praise which takes away one’s breath. A woman who smokes in public and where she is forbidden, who dresses in knickerbockers or a boy’s suit, who trails about in tigerskins, who flouts conventional decencies and offends against all the canons of good taste, that woman is pronounced 'charming,’ and the able editor turns on one of his young lions to write her eulogium and celebrate her extravagance. To ensure the good word of the hysterical press a woman need only kick over the traces either in manners or morals. She is then sure of her trumpeter, Gratuitous advertisement is given to the adventuress who seeks to make capital of her shame. A flaming review records the appearance of a book of travels of which the imaginative ’ superstructure bears, the same proportion to the substratum of fact as Falstaff's intolerable deal of sack bore to his one halfpenny-worth of bread. A vain and restless ‘explorer ’ who has done no kind of good to anyone, and who has merely given worlds of trouble to every¬ one concerned, receives the honour due to serious exploration and important discovery. And so on through the whole list of feminine follies and escapades. The less lovely the thing, the more ardently it is celebrated by the men whose main endeavour in this direction is to destroy the old ideals, and to substitute for the beautiful women of history and fiction the swaggering Wild Women of the present craze. The truth is simpy this— the unsexed woman pleases the unsexed man. This is not the only age in which carpet knights and amazons have made a sectional amalgam wherein is neither wholesomeness nor beauty. The thing is a physiological fact as intelligible as it is absolute. Domineering women choose effeminate men whom they can rule at will. Effeminate men fall back on resolute and energetic women.

Few women are large-minded enough to prefer knowledge to sentiment. The cold light of reason blinds and terrifies them ; and things which they do not care to know they would forbid others to learn, if they had the power of the veto. They would confine the area of men’s excursions to the limits of their own ; and such conditions of the masculine life as they did not care to adopt they would forbid men to practise. We have had a notable instance of this mental absolutism of late, at the death of one of our most learned scholars and frank agnostics. He was no sooner dead than his widow surrounded him with the emblems and rites of her own faith—which was not his. She did not shrink from inflicting this dishonour on the memory of the man who had systematically preached a doctrine so adverse to her own. She cared nothing for the integrity of the life she thus stultified—nothing for the grandeur of the intellect she thus belittled. What she thought right, that she determined he should be made to share, now that she was absolute and he was only one of the strengthless dead; and she would not see the pitiful discredit she thus cast on the name and memory of the man she professed to love.

Impatience with what is wrong, but, as things are and under this dispensation, with what is unavoidable, makes a Wild Woman when predominant one of the most autocratic of all the tyrants of the race. The better she is in herself, the more arbitrary she is in her enactments. What cannot be reformed out of hand she would destroy at a moment’s notice. The American temperance women wreck the grogshops as they stand; and their partisans over here follow suit so far as they can.

But indeed the simplicity of these partisans of the Wild Women is one of the most remarkable things in the whole matter. A journal specially devoted to this crook-backed cause prints a letter from a young man whose ignorance it would seem to make the measure of other folks’ knowledge. This young man innocently questions the truth of those acts of smoking, shooting, horse-racing, and other unlovely things attributed to the Wild sect. He has never seen the like, he says; ergo, he does not believe in the existence of what he does not know. This letter was in the paper which went into cheap raptures over the dainty cigarettes, toasts, and after-dinner speeches of a set of dining women; which spoke of the ‘ charmingly unconventional’ aspect of the young lady setting forth to fish or shoot in knickerbockers, with a cigarette in her mouth ; which recorded the fact that two young American women were arrested for having concealed about them in a proclaimed district, the one a seven-chambered and the other a five-chambered revolver, with ammunition; and which celebrates with a beating of its tomtoms and a braying of its cow-horns all and sundry who go off the beaten track of womanly modesty and reserve.

To keep the balance even, we do not remember to have seen from these partisans of the Wild Women any characteristically enthusiastic laudation of the quiet workers who content themselves with doing good work of a non-glaring kind—work that merely advances our knowledge in certain directions, and that raises all with whom it is associated. Perhaps we may say, the saints be praised in that it escapes the damage done by the advocacy of the Wild Woman’s partisans! We will give to these restless wild creatures all the honour to which they are entitled for their mischievous interference in politics, their useless tramps abroad—which are only .self-advertisements and which do not add a line to our knowledge of men or countries, their platform speeches and stump oratory which darken counsel and confuse plain issues. Such credit as is to be scraped out of these things let them enjoy. But to that entomologist whose knowledge is such a boon to agriculture; that astronomer who popularises things remote and celestial; that naturalist who does the same by the living world for her youthful readers; that Grecian scholar who lectures with so much skill and learning; that patroness of good needlework; that creator of a new school of embroidery; that Lake-side founder of art schools and patroness of the linen industry—to all of these and many more of the same kind we pay the hearty and reverent homage due to thoroughness of achievement, modesty of method, and practical usefulness of aim. These are the women who keep the world of feminine activities pure and sweet. For the others—-platforms, committee-rooms, knickerbockers, cowhides and all—we can give praise nor find hope of profit.

The new school of Liberals from which the most uncompromising partisans of the Wild Woman are drawn make those who belonged to the older school anxiously reconsider their principles— yet more anxiously examine their position. To what is this new liberalism tending ? To universal topsyturvydom and as universal licence ? It would seem so. If we contrast the Radical penny paper with the older journals, we see the decadence, not only of style, but of thought and principle, which this new ideal of womanhood, this new standard of decency has brought about. The degradation of men, that so the apotheosis of undesirable women may be more surely accomplished, is one of these steps downward. The emancipation of youth and ignorance from the control of age and knowledge, and the coachmanship of so many Phaetons, set on guiding the chariot of the sun, is another. The complacent advocacy of self-will, vanity, restlessness; the want of reverence for what is established and of good repute— what has been hallowed by time and proved by trial—with the helping hand given to all that is new, fanciful, crazy, iconoclastic; the loosening of restraining bonds ; the repudiation of engagements; the contempt for law; the destruction of discipline; the preference of minorities and their feds over the claims of majorities and the general good—these are just a few of the fruits to be gathered from the upas-tree which some of the Radical journals so diligently seek to plant. And more than one of the older Liberals, with the definite aims of their own youthful aspirations happily accomplished, stand aghast at the programme of lawlessness and disorder, of revolutionary extravagance, to which the later school has committed itself. How far is this sincere ? How far is it a consideration of pence and profit, and what will best sell the edition whereof the buyers and patrons are the unsatisfied and the idle, being also the desirous and the ambitious ? In either case, sincere or calculated, it is a proof of moral crookedness and intellectual blindness which bode ill to the country should they get the better of straight ways and clear sight.

Impatient of rebuke, of opposition, of reasonable advice, these partisans, like the Wild Women they champion, show only disrespect to one who runs counter to their craze, no matter how worthy he may be of honour and attention. Let anyone commend to these female runagates quietness, duty, home-staying, and the whole cohort of Wild Women is like an angry beehive which a rough hand has disturbed. They care nothing for home ; quietness is abhorrent to them; duty went out with their grandmothers’ caps and mittens. They will not hear of differences in virtues, in functions, in duties, in spheres. They do not even honour those of their own sex who do good work quietly, without tomtoms or cow-horns to call attention to their feats. They think them spiritless, and for a very little would brand them as slaves too deeply degraded by slavery to wish for freedom—as squaws whose mission it is to serve the braves and take their leavings with humility. They have lost all respect for the old ideal womanhood, as they have lost the wish to realise that ideal. They repudiate the charm which gives them influence, and stretch out their hands for the rod of direct power which would turn into a serpent if they had it. And their partisans encourage them with voice and hand, and urge them on to ever fresh outbreaks and more monstrous demands.

The whole thing is an epidemic of vanity and restlessness—a disease as marked as measles or small-pox. Let that be clearly understood. Hereafter this outbreak will stand in history as an instance of national sickness, of moral decadence, of social disorder. Things repeat themselves, and the Revolt of Women has been seen in the world before now. We have no hope of those who are already committed to this subversive movement. It takes courage of a different kind from theirs to acknowledge a mistake. But we may influence some of the younger, hesitating on the brink. Would that they would draw back from the fatal plunge while yet there is time! Would that they could be made to see clearly the folly of their demands and the evil that would come on their attainment ! The way of escape is still open to them. In a short, time they will have become as hardened as their leaders, and too deeply committed to turn back. Then repentance and restoration will be impossible.

E. LYNN LINTON.

The first impulse of women whom Mrs. Lynn Linton calls 'wild’ is probaly to contradict the charges that she makes against them in the course of three ruthless articles, but reflection shows the futility as well as the inconsequence of such a proceeding. After all, those who have lost-faith in the old doctrines are not so much concerned to prove themselves, as individuals, wise and estimable, as to lead thinking men and women to consider the nature of popular sentiments with regard to the relation of the sexes, and to ask themselves whether the social fiat which for centuries has foreced every woman, whatever be her natural inclinations or powers into one avocation be really wise or just; whether, in truth, it be in the interests of the race to deprive one half of it of liberty of choice, to select for them their mode of existence, and to prescribe for them their very sentiments.

To the task of opposing the conclusions of Mrs. Lynn Linton her adversaries must bring considerable force and patience, and for this singular reason, that she gives them nothing to answer. One cannot easily reply to strings of accusations against the personal qualities of women who venture to hold views at variance with those at which the world arrived at some happy and infallible epoch in its history. The unbeliever finds himself thrown back upon the simple school-room form of discussion, consisting in that contradiction, persistently repeated until the energies give out. As this method appears undignified and futile, it seems better to let most of the charges pass in silence, commenting only on one or two here and there in passing. It is of no real moment- whether Mrs. Lynn Linton’s unfavourable impression of the women who differ from her in this matter be just or unjust, the question is simply : are their views nearer or farther from the truth than the doctrines from which they dissent? As regards their personal qualities, it must in fairness be remembered that the position of the advocate of an unpopular cause is a very trying one ; the apostles of a new faith are generally driven, by the perpetual fret of opposition and contempt, to some rancour or extravagance ; but such conduct merely partakes of the frailty of human nature, and ought not to prejudice a really impartial mind against the views themselves.

Such a mind will consider principles and not persons; and although the absurdities of its champions may tell against the spread of a new doctrine among the mass, it certainly ought not to retard it among thinkers and students of history, who must be well aware that the noblest causes have not been able to command infallible advocates, nor to protect themselves from perilous friends. It would be interesting to make a collection from the writings of Mrs. Lynn Linton of all the terrific charges that she has brought against her sex, adding them up in two columns, and placing side by side the numerous couples that contradict each other. At the end of this sad list one might place the simple sentence of defence, ‘No, we aren't!' and although this would certainly lack the eloquence and literary quality of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s arguments, I deny that it would yield to them in cogency.

There is nothing that is mean, paltry, ungenerous, tasteless, or ridiculous of which the woman who repudiates the ancient doctrines is not capable, according to this lady, unless, indeed, they are such abject fools that, they have not the energy to be knaves. The logic is stern : either a woman is a ‘ modest violet, blooming unseen,’ unquestioning, uncomplaining, a patient producer of children regardless of all costs to herself; suffering 'everyone’s opinion to influence her mind' and ‘all venerable laws hallowed by time … to control her actions’ —either this, or a rude masculine creature, stamping over moors with a gun that she may ape the less noble propensities of man ; an adventuress who exposes herself to the dangers of travel simply that she may advertise herself in a book on her return ; a virago who desires nothing better than to destroy in others the liberty that, she so loudly demands for herself. There is, according to Mrs. Lynn Linton, no medium between Griselda and a sublimated Frankenstein’s monster, which we have all so often heard of and seldom seen. Mrs. Lynn Linton’s experience in this respect appears to have been ghastly. This is greatly to be regretted, for it has induced her to divide women roughly into two classes : the good, beautiful, submissive, charming, noble, and wise on the one hand, and on the other, the bad, ugly, rebellious, ill-mannered, ungenerous, and foolish. The ‘ wild women ’ are like the plain and wicked elder sisters in a fairy tale, baleful creatures who go about the world doing bad deeds and oppressing innocence as it sits rocking the cradle by the fireside. It seems hard for the poor elder sisters to be told off to play this dreadful role, amid the hisses of the gallery, and they deserve some sympathy after all, for truly the world offers temptations to evil courses, and innocence at the cradle can be desperately exasperating at times! It has a meek, placid, sneaky, virtuous way of getting what it wants, and making it hot and uncomfortable for unpopular elder sisters. After all, in spite of Mrs. Lynn Linton, there is no more finished tyrant in the world than the meek sweet creature who cares nothing for her ‘ rights' because she knows she can get all she wants by artifice; who makes a weapon of her womanhood, a sword of strength of her weakness, and does not disdain to tyrannise over men to her heart's content by an ungenerous appeal to their chivalry. She is a woman—poor, weak, helpless, and her husband may not call his soul his own ! Tears are a stock-in-trade, and nerves a rock of defence. She claims no rights—she can’t understand what all this absurd talk is about—she is quite satisfied with things as they are. Personal dignity she has none; it would sadly interfere with her successful methods of insinuating herself through life, in serpentine fashion ; she gets what she can as best she may, living by her wits ; a mere adventuress, after all, in spite of her unblemished character; appealing to men's passions, frailties, chivalry; often differing from a class of women whose very name she would scarcely mention, in the nature of her suroundings and her supreme sense of responsibility, rather than in the essential nature of her position.

But far be it from me to affirm, in simple opposition to Mrs. Lynn Linton that all women of the old school are of this kind. My object is not merely to bring a counter-charge, but to point to the type which power on the one side and subordination on the other tend to produce. There are thousands, however, of time-honoured school who never dream of attempting this unconscious retaliation. Many of them neither demand rights nor win their way by artifice. They accept their lot, just as it is, in a literal spirit, being just enough developed to see the imeanness of trading upon the chivalry of men. and not enough so to resent being placed in a position which makes them dependent, utterly and hopelessly, upon their favour. These women—the most pathetic class of all—have been so well drilled to accept their position without, question, that they launch their complaints only at Fate and Nature, if ever they are moved to complain at all. Their conscience and their generosity forbid them to make use of the usual weapons of a dependent race, artifice and flattery ; so that they are denied even this redress, which less sensitive women enjoy without stint. These half-developed women respond loyally to the stern demands made upon them by public sentiment ; they are martyrs to ' duty ’ in its narrowest sense; they turn a meek ear to society when it addresses homilies to them, inculcating the highest principles, and showering upon them the heaviest responsibilities, without dreaming of bestowing corresponding rights.

In short, the women of the old order and the women of the new have faults and virtues each after their own kind, and it is idle to make general affirmations about cither class.

It is well, therefore, to check the inherent instinct to contradict when Mrs. Lynn Linton says that women of the new faith are evil and ugly ; one must say rather that this is a mere matter of opinion, formed from the impression each person gathers from individual experience, and from the bias with which that experience is met. Let, however, the impression be as unfavourable to the ‘ wild women ’ as it may, it is neither fair nor philosophic to refuse to cotisider their claims. The liberal-minded will remember that the claims of a class hitherto subordinate always seem preposterous, and that the more complete has been their exclusion, the more ridiculous will appear their aspirations. Yet this inclination to treat with derision any new demand for liberty stands on a level with the instinct of the street-urchin to jeer at anything to which he is unaccustomed, as, for example, any person in foreign garments, though he excel a thousand times in dignity and comeliness the natives of the country.

It is not very surprising if some of the apostles of the new faith, irritated by the most powerful hindrances of law, sentiment, tradition— baffling, subtle, unceasing as these are—have made the mistake, as I think, of seeking to emphasis their demand for the liberty that men enjoy by imitating men’s habits and manners, and by seizing every occasion to take part in the fierce battle for existence, as if that were a desirable thing in itself, instead of an unhappy necessity. They are not alone in their error, however; they are not singular when they fail to see that the life that men now lead, in the effort to ‘ earn a living and to succeed,’ is crazy and perilous to themselves and to the race. To add to that great body of struggling men another body of struggling women would evidently not mend matters, and it is clear that the hopes which we may hold fortlu* future of the race through the emancipation of women cannot rest on the prospect of their entering the tumultuous arena of competition, and spending their strength in that fruitless fashion. Undeniably it would be wiser if women would use their influence to render the conflict less fierce, to slacken the greed for money, success, display, and to turn the ambitions of men to more rational and fruitful ways.

But, however true all this may be, it is unluckily also true that women have to live, and that even those who have a father or a husband have, at most, food and shelter, they have not independence. The wife among the less prosperous of the middle classes, who takes upon her shoulder's at least half the burden of the household—to put it very mildlv—may toil all her life and grow worn with anxiety and worry, but she will still be as dependent upon her husband’s will or caprice as if she were an idler living upon his unearned bounty. Women are beginning to feel this more or less distinctly, and to desire to earn a little money for themselves, so that they may possess some means of subsistence that is really their own, small though it may be. This is surely natural enough, however evil may be the consequenecs of an inrush of women workers into the labour market. Since the work of women in their homes is not of a kind to give them independence, they are beginning to seek for emplooyment of a sort that is recognised as deserving of reward, knowing that their pecuniary position etenially stands in the way of any improvement as regards their legal and social status, and that it often obliges them to submit to a thousand wrongs and indignities which could not otherwise be placed upon them.

A certain number of rebels are bending all their energies to the removal of this invincible hindrance, and to attain this end they are forced to join more or less in the struggle for a livelihood. It will be a happy day for humanity when a woman can stay in her own home without sacrificing her freedom. Shortsighted is the which would keep the wife and mother helpless in the hands of the man whose home she sustains and holds together, which would give her but a meagre share of right to the children which have cost her so much to bear and tend, while burdening her with the fullest responsibility regarding them. To this point I would especially call the attention of that large portion of the community who are convinced of the importance of the fireside and the home, who believe that in every other locality the woman is out of her sphere. Would they not use their influence most wisely, from their own point of view, in seeking to remove some of the heavy penalties that are attached to the enjoyment of home and fireside, and to make them deserve a little better all the sentiment that has been lavished upon them?

It is easy indeed to see the frightful peril to the well-being of the race that lies in the labour of women outside the home; that peril can scarcely be exaggerated ; but if women demand the natural human right to take their share of the opportunities, such as they are, which the world has to offer—if they desire the privilege of independence (a privilege denied them, work as they will, within the home), by what right does society refuse their demand ? Men are living lives and committing actions day by day which imperil and destroy the well-being of the race ; on what principle are women only to be restrained? Why this one-sided sacrifice, this artificial selection of victims for the good of society? The old legends of maidens who were chosen every year and chained to a rock by the shore to propitiate gods or sea-monsters seem not in the least out of date. Sacrifices were performed more frankly in those days, and nobody tried to persuade the victims that it was enjoyable and blessed to be devoured ; they did not talk about ‘woman’s sphere’ to a maiden chained to the rock within sight of the monster, nor did they tell her that the ' true woman ’ desired no other destiny. They were brutal, but they did not add sickly sentiment to their crime against the individual; they carried out the hideous old doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, which is haunting us like an evil spirit to this day, in all good faith and frankness, and there was no attempt to represent the monster as an engaging beast when you got to know him.

Society has no right fo exact these sacrifices; every member of it must stand equal in its sight, if it would claim the name of a free state. On the soil of such a state there must be no arbitrary selection of victims for the general good made from a certain class, or, still worse, from a certain sex. One can imagine the heaven-assaulting howl that would go up were it proposed to deal in this way with a certain body of men; if it were decreed that they should be restricted from seeking their fortunes as might seem good to them, restrained only by the laws that all the rest of the community were called upon to obey. No argument about the welfare of the race would reconcile a nation of free-born men to such a proposal. Yet this is the argument that free-born men do not hesitate to use regarding women.

The attempt to force upon these any sacrifice on the sole ground of their sex, to demand of them a special act of renunciation on that account, gives us an exact analogue of the old tribute to its gods of a nation which chose its victims not by fair hazard from the entire population, but from a class set apart for the cruel purpose. Such actions are subversive of all social life, for the existence of a community depends finally upon its respect for individual rights. Upon these rights society is built ; without them, nothing is possible but an aggregation of tyrants and slaves, which does not deserve the name of a society, since it is bound together by force, and the union between its members is accidental, not organic. On what rests finally my safety and freedom as a citizen, but on the understanding that if I leave your rights intact you will also respect mine?

But, further, the argument which lakes its stand upon the danger to society of the freedom of women, besides being unfair (since it would select a whole sex for the propitiatory victims), is, on its own ground, unsound. True, indeed, is it that if all women were to rush into the labour market and begin to compete with men and with one another, the result would be evil ; but it is not true that if they were to be placed on an equality with men in the eye of the law, if in marriage they wore free from legal or pecuniary disadvantage, if in society they had no special prejudices to contend with—it is not true in that case that the consequence of this change in their position would be detrimental to the real interests of society. On the contrary, its influence would be for good, and for more good than perhaps any one now dares to believe. And among the many causes of this beneficent result we may number this, that women would be able to choose the work for which they were best suited. We should have fewer governesses who loathed teaching, fewer wives who could do most things better than look after a house and fewer mothers to whom the training of children was an impossible task. Moreover, society would rejoice in more of that healthy variety among her members which constitutes one of the elements of vitality. There is room for all kinds of women, did we but realise it, and there is certainly no reason why the present movement should sweep away all those of the ancient type in whom Mrs. Lynn Linton takes delight. They have their charm, but it must be acknowledged that, for all their meekness, nothing would please them better than tyrannically to dictate their own mode of life to their sisters. By what charter or authority does the domestic woman (like the person in the train who wants the window up) attempt to restrict within her own limits women who entirely disagree with her in opinion and in temperament ?

Granted for a moment that Mrs. Lynn Linton and her followers are justified of Heaven in their views, and that it always was and always will be necessary for women to dedicate themsolves wholly to the production of the race, still this truth—if such it be—must be left to demonstrate itself without any tyranny, direct or indirect, from those who realise it, otherwise they violate the condition of social liberty. The history of all persecutions, religious and otherwise, ought to warn us against the danger of allowing the promulgation of the true faith by forcible means, and I include among forcible means all forms of prejudice and sentiment, for often these are far more powerful than legal enactments. Let us not forget the glorious privilege of the citizen of a free state to be in the wrong and to act upon his error until the torch-bearer's of truth shall be able to throw light upon his pathway. That once aceomplislied, his adherence will be worth having.

The demand that all women shall conform to a certain model of excellence, that, they shall be debarred from following the prompttings of their powers and instincts, whatsoever be the pretext for the restriction, is the outcome of an iliberal spirit, and ought to be resisted as all attacks on liberty ought to be resisted. The fact that the attack is made upon liberties which, as yet, are only candidate's for existence, is the sole reason why Englishmen do not resent the aggression as they would resent any other interference with personal freedom.

Let it be remembered, for the consolation of those who fear the results of this new movement, that if modern women are lapsing from the tnue faith, if they are really insurgents against evolutionary human nature, and not the indications of a now social development, then their fatal error will assuredly prove itself. Should some harm be suffered in the proving, that is merely the risk that has to be taken in all free states for the possibility of progress.

These, then, are the principles upon which women of the new faith claim tolerance for their views, be they right or wrong. Having claimed these initial rights, they then proceed to give their reasons for holding such views, and for the rebellion which they preach against the old order.

To the time-honoured argument that nature intended man to be anything and everything that his strength of muscle and of mind permitted, while she meant woman to be a mother, and nothing else, the rebels reply, that if a woman has been made by nature to be a mother, so has a cow or a sheep; and if this maternal capacity be really an infallible indication of function, there is nothing to prevent this reasoning from running down-hill to its conclusion, namely, that the nearer a woman can become to a cow or a sheep the better.

If popular feeling objects to this conclusion, and yet still desires all women to make maternity their life duty, it must find another reason for its faith, leaving nature's sign-posts out of the question. On these sign-posts man himself is privileged to write and rewrite the legends, though of this power he seems at present to be uuconscious, persistently denying it even while his restless fingers are busy at their work.

This dear and cherished appeal to nature, however, will never be abandoned bv the advocates of the old order while breath remains to them. But if they use the argument they ought not to shrink from its consequence, nor, indeed, would they, but that it happens that women, as a matter of fact, have risen above the stage of simple motherhood, accustoming their critics to attributes distinctively human; and these having by this time become familiar, no longer seem alarming or 'unnnatural.' In our present stage of development we demand of a woman that she shall be first of all a mother, and then that she develop those human qualities which best harmonise with her position as such. 'Be it pleasant or unpleasant.' Mrs. Lynn Linton says, ‘ it is none the less an absolute truth—the raison d'etre of a woman is maternity. . . . The cradle lies across the door of the polling-booth and bars the way to the Senate.'

We are brought, then, to this conclusion : that if there be any force in what is commonly urged respecting nature's ' intentions ' with regard to woman, her development as a thinking and emotional being beyond the point where human qualities are superficially useful to her children is 'unnatural ' and false, a conclusion which leads us straight away to Oriental customs and to Oriental ethics. Moreover, another consideration confronts us : nature, besides designing women to be mothers, designed men to be fathers ; why, then, should not the man give up his life to his family in the same wholesale way ? ' The, cases are so different,’ it will be said. yes, and the lie difference lies in the great suffering and risk which fall solely to the share of the mother. Is this a good reason for holding her for her whole life to this painful task, for demanding that she shall allow her tastes and talents to lie idle and to die a slow and painful death, while the father, to whom parenthood is also indicated by ‘ nature,' is allowed the privilege of choosing his own avocations without interference? Furtlier, if woman’s functions are to be deti'rmineil solely by a reference to what is called nature, how, from this point of view, are we to deal with the fact that she possesses a thousand emotional and intellectual attributes that are wholly superfluous to her merely maternal activities ? What does Mrs. Lynn Linton consider that ‘ nature intends ’ by all this ? In the present order of society, speaking roughly, a woman, to whom maternity seems unsatisfying or distasteful, has either to bring herself to undertake the task for which she is unfitted, or to deny her affections altogether. To man, the gods give both sides of the apple of life; a woman is offered the choice of the halves—either, but not both.

Yet every new development of society, every overthrow of ancient landmarks, tends to prove more and more conclusively that this fetish ‘ nature,’ who is always claimed as the patroness of the old order, just when she is busy planning and preparing the new, has not separated the human race into two distinct sections, with qualities entirely and eternally different. If this were so—if women were, in fact, the only beings under heaven not moditiable by education, and surroundings, then we should be forced to reconstruct from the foundation our notions of natural law, and to rescind the comparatively modern theory that it is unwise to expect effects without causes, and causes without effects, even in the mysterious domain of human nature. We should live once more in a world of haphazard and of miracle, in which only one fact could be counted upon from age to age, viz., the immutable and stereotyped ‘nature of women.

Unless we are prepared for this antique and variegated creed, we cannot consistently pronounce, as Mrs. Lynn Linton cheerfully pronounces, what the sphere and raison d'etre of either sex are, and must be for evermore. It seems, indeed, safe to predict that women will continue to bear children, but it is far from safe to prophesy to what extent that function will in the future absorb their energies and determine the horizon of their life. We know that although men have been fathers from the beginning of human history, they have not made fatherhood the keynote of their existence; on the contrary, it has been an entirely secondary consideration. They have been busy in influencing and fashioning a world which their children are to inherit—a world that would be sorrier than it is if men had made the fact of parenthood the central point of their career. Women have been forced, partly by their physical constitution, but more by the tyranny of society, to expend their whole energies in maternal cares, and this has been the origin of a thousand evils: it has destroyed the healthy balance of their nature, thrown work on to unfit, shoulders, formed a sort of press-gang of the most terrible kind, inasmuch as unwilling motherhood is worse than unwilling military sefvice ; and it has deprived the very children in whose behalf this insane cruelty has been wrought of the benefit of possessing mothers and teachers whose character is developed all round, whose faculties are sound and healthy, whose minds are fresh, buoyant, and elastic, and stored with such knowledge of nature and life as would make them efficient guides and guardians to those helpless ones who are at the outset of their career. It may seem paradoxical, but is none the less true, that we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence. The woman who has no interest larger than the affairs of her children is not a fit person to train them.

For the sake of men, women, and children, it is to be hoped that women will come to regard motherhood with new eyes ; that the force of their artificially fostered impulses will become less violent; and that there may be an increase in them of the distinctly human qualities and emotions in relation to those merely instinctive or maternal. It is this change of proportion in the force of human qualities that virtually creates a new being, and makes progress possible. In the light of this truth, how false are all the inferences of phrases such as ' Nature intends,’ ‘ Nature desires; ’ she intends and desires nothing—she is an abject slave. Man intends, Man desires, and ‘ Nature,’ in the course of centuries, learns to obey.

This worship of ‘ nature’ is a strange survival in a scientific age of the old image-worship of our ancestors. She is our Vishnu or Siva, our Odin and Thor, a personal will who designs and plans. This is a subtle form of superstition which has cunningly nestled among the folds of the garment of Science, and there it will lurk safe and undetected for many years, to discourage all change, to cast discredit on all new thought, to hold man to his errors, and to blind him to his own enormous power of development.

It is this insidious superstition that prevents even intelligent people from recognising the effect upon women of their circumstances. Professions are known to leave their mark on men, although the influence of a man's profession is not so incessant and overwhelming as are the conditions of women’s lives, from which there is no escape from the cradle to the grave; yet it is always grudgingly and doubtfully admitted, if at all, that this fact offers an explanation for any bad quality in the feminine character, any weakness or excess of which women may be guilty. No one seems to realise how age after age they have been, one and all, engaged in the same occupations, subjected to the same kind of stimulus and training ; how each individual of infinitely varying multitudes has been condemned to one function for the best years of life, and that function an extremely painful and exhausting one. No one seems to understand that these causes must produce effects, and that they have produced the effect of creating in women certain tyrannous and overwrought instincts which we say, reverentially and obstinately, ‘ Nature has implanted in woman.’ We might more accurately say ‘ Suffering, moral and mental starvation, physical pain, diseases induced by the overexcitement of one set of functions, one-sided development—these have implanted impulses which we have the assurance to call sacred.’

At the present time, some very interesting researches are being carried on, which tend to show, so far as they have gone, that the physical nature of women has been literally destroyed by the overexcitement and ill-usage, often unwitting, which public sentiment has forced them to submit to, while dependence on men has induced them often to endure it as if it were the will of Heaven.

These researches show that through these centuries of overstrain, one set of faculties being in perpetual activity while the others lay dormant, women have fallen the victims of chronic disease, and this condition of disease has become also a condition of a woman’s existence. Have we not gone far enough along this path of destruction, or must we still make motherhood our chief duty, accept the old sentiment about our subservience to man, and drive yet farther into the system the cruel diseases that have punished the insanities of the past, taking vengeance upon the victims of ill-usage for their submission, and pursuing their children from generation to generation with relentless footsteps? Such is the counsel of Mrs. Lynn Linton and her school. Upon the effects of all this past ill-treatment is founded the pretext for women’s disabilities in the present. They are physically weak, nervous, easily unstrung, and for this reason, it is urged, they must continue to pursue the mode of life which has induced these evils. This is strange reasoning.

The suffering of women to-day is built upon their suffering yesterday and its consequences. It is surely a rather serious matter to cut off a human being from whatever the world has to offer him in this one short life! From this point of view what force or meaning have Mrs. Lynn Linton’s taunts and accusations against her sex, even though they were all perfectly just? It is possible that women, in virtue of their susceptible physical constitution and nervous system (a quality, by the way, which distinguishes the man of genius from the ordinary being), are more responsive than men are to their surroundings and all that Mrs. Lynn Linton says, if true, about the wildness of ignorant women in times of excitement—she cites for an example the tricoteuses of the French Revolution— might perhaps be explained on this ground. A quick response to stimulus is not the mark of a being low in the scale of existence, though it may lead to extravagant deeds when untutored. But Mrs. Lynn Linton will not look at this question philosophically; she hurls accusations at her sex as if it pleased her to add another insult to those which the literature of centuries—with that exquisite chivalry which we are so often warned our freedom would destroy— has never tired of flinging at the defenceless sex. It does not strike Mrs. Lynn Linton to inquire into the real causes that underlie all these problems of a growing human nature; she prefers the simple finger of scorn, the taunt, the inexpensive sneer.

Why does she so harshly condemn the results of the system of things which she so ardently approves? To make her position more difficult to understand, Mrs. Lynn Linton dwells with some insistence on the effects upon her sex of their training. She speaks of ‘ ideal qualities which women have gained by a certain amount of sequestration from the madding crowd's ignoble strife. . . . Are the women at the gin-shop bar,’ she demands, ‘better than the men at the gin- shop door; the field hands in sun-bonnets more satisfactory than those in brimless hats? ’ This is to prove that women have no real moral superiority. Elsewhere is asked : ‘Can anyone point out anywhere a race of women who are superior to their conditions?’ All this is strange reasoning from one who takes her stand in the fiats of ‘nature' as distinguished from the influences of surroundings.

One might ask: anyone point, out anywhere a race of men who are superior to their conditions ? ’ But this possible question never seems to strike Mrs. Lynn Linton, for she exposes herself all through the article to the same form of demand, and she nowhere attempts to meet it. Her mode of warfare is indeed bewildering, for she attacks from both sides, makes double and antagonistic use of the same facts, and she does not at all object to assertions clearly contradictory, provided they are separated in time and space by the interval of a paragraph or two.

Her arguments when formidable, mutually and relentlessly devour each other, like so many plus and minus quantities which, added together, become cancelled and leave a clean zero between them.

Unconscious, however, of this cannilialism among her legions, the authoress finds herself at the close of her article with a gigantic and robust opinion which nothing—not even her own arguments —can disturb.

As an instance of this strange suicidal tendency of her reasoning we may compare the already quoted paragraphs setting forth the effects of enviromnemt upon the woman's temperament with the even more determined assertion of its eternal, unalterable, and God- ordained nature. Confront these two statements, and what remains? Mrs. L ynn Linton seemsto half surrender her position when she says that . . . there are few women of anything like energy or brain- power who have not felt in their own souls the ardent longing for a freer hand in life; hut the following sentence seems to play still more into the hands of the enemy : ‘Had Louis the Sixteenth had Marie Antoinette’s energy and Marie Antoinette Louis's suRineness, the whole story of the Reign of Terror, Marat. Charlotte Corde, and Napoleon might never have been written.’ What doctrine of Mrs. Lynn Linton's does it even seem to support ?

In unblushing contradiction of this sentiment Mrs. Lynn Linton asserts that political women have always been ‘disastrous,’ and that even Mme. Roland ‘did more harm than good when she undertook the manipulation of forces that were too strong for her control, too vast for her comprehension.'

Were the forces of the French Revolution within the grasp of any one person?

‘Women are both more extreme and more impressionable than men,’ Mrs. Lynn Linton says; ‘ and the spirit which made weak ' girls into heroines and martyrs, honest women into the yelling tricoleuses of the blood-stained saturnalia of '92, still exists in the sex, and among ourselves as elsewhere.’

In short, when a "weak’ girl espouses martyrdom she is prompted thereto by a sort of hysteria, male heroism alone being heroic.

While admitting, nay, emphasising, on the one hand the fact of the remodelling force of circumstances, Mrs. Lynn Linton denies that feminine character and intelligence can ever be altered by one hair's breadth, except—and here comes the third and crowning contradiction—-except for the worse.

Among the many other minor points which Mrs. Lynn Linton has touched upon are several which call for special comment from the point of view opposed to hers. For example, we are asked to believe that, the peace of the home practically depends on the political disabilities of woman; or, in other words, that a man is unable to endure in his wife opinions differing from his own. I do not believe that men are quite so childish and petty as this; but if they are, it is indeed high time that they should learn the lesson of common courtesy and tolerance.

The device of keeping peace between two persons by the disarmament of one of them is ingenious and simple, but there is temptation to think that such peace as that, if peace it can be called, would be well exchanged for strife. Does peace, indeed, mean the stagnation that arises from the relationship between the free and the fettered, or does it mean the generous mutual recognition of the right of private judgment? Identity of opinion between two people, even when not produced artificially, is not always inspiriting to either of them. The denial of political power to women, if it ever does prevent dissension, achieves at best, on the part of the wife, unreasoning acquiescence and not rational agreement.

Mrs. Lynn Linton says that amongst our most renowned women are some who say with their whole heart. 'I would rather have been the wife of a great man, or the mother of a hero, than what I am— famous in my own person.” ’ That is a, matter of taste, but it seems strange that those famous women should not have acted upon their predilections. Against the following sentence I cannot refrain from expressing a sense of revolt; but the revolt is on behalf of men rather than of women. ‘But the miserable little mannikin who creeps to obscurity, overshadowed by his wife's glory, is as pitiful in history as contemptible in fact. The husband of the wife is no title to honour ; and the best and dearest of our famous women take care that this shall not be said of them and theirs.’

Are men, then, to be treated as if they were a set of jealous schoolboys, or superannuated invalids whom the discreet person allows to win at chess, because they have a childish dislike to being beaten ?

It is consoling to remember that the ideas on which such feelings rest are giving way slowly but surely in all directions. It is only when the rebellion is extended over evidently new ground that Mrs. Lynn Linton and her followers begin to sound the tocsin, assuring the rebellious woman that she shows ‘ a curious inversion of sex, disdaining the duties and limitations imposed on her by nature.’ As a final taunt, Mrs, Lynn Linton says: ‘ All women are not always lovely, and the wild women never are.’ This reminds one of the exasperated retort of an angry child who has come to the end of his invention—a galling if somewhat inconsexpient attack upon the personal appearnace, which is the last resort of outraged juvenile nature.

Nothing perhaps can better show the real attitude of this lady and her followers on this question than her irritation against those who are trying to bring a ray of sunlight into the harems and zenanas of the East: —

Ignorant and unreasonable (she says), they would carry into the sun-laden East the social conditions born of the icy winds of the North. . .. In a country where jealousy is as strong as death, and stronger than love, they would incite women to revolt against the rule of seclusion, which has been the law of the land for centuries before we were a nation at all. That rule has worked well for the country, inasmuch us the chastity of Hindu women and the purity of the family life are notoriously intact.

If Mrs. Lynn Linton approves of the relation of the sexes in the East, and looks upon it with an eye of fondness because it dates back into ages whose, savagery clings to us, and breaks out in the blood of civilised men to this day, then she may well set herself in opposition to the rebellion among modern women against the infinitely less intolerable injustice which they suffer in the West. Did we happen to be living in harems in South Kensington or Mayfair, with the sentiment of the country in favour of that modest and womanly state of seclusion, it is easy to imagine with what eloquence Mrs. Lynn Linton would declaim against the first hint of insurrection—although in that case, by the way. the strictly unfeminine occupation of writing articles would be denied her.

The really grave question raised in theses essays is that of the effect of the political and social freedom of women upon the physical well-being of the race; for while past conditions have been evil, future ones may conceivably be equally so, though they could with difficulty be worse. This is indeed a serious problem which will require all the intelligence of this generation to solve. But first I would suggest what appears to be a new idea (strange as this may seem), namely, that the rights of the existing race are at least as great as those of the coming one. There is something pathetically absurd in the sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown people. Who were the gainers by the incessant sacrifice ? Of what avail was all that renunciation on behalf of those potential men and women, if on their attainment of that degree they, too, have to abandon the fruits of so much pain and so many lost possibilities, and begin all over again to weave ad infinitum this singular Penelope’s web ? The affairs of the present are carried on by the adult population, not by the children ; and if the generations of adults are going to renounce, age after age, their own dhances of development—resigning, as so many mothers do, opportunities of intellectual progress and spiritual enlightenment for the like of their children—how in the name of common sense will they benefit humanity ? For those children also, when their minds are ripe for progress, must, in accordance with this noble simtiment, immediately begin in their turn to renounce, and resign, and deny themselves, in order to start another luckless generation upon the same ridiculous circle of futility! I fear that it is not unnecessary to add that I do not here inculcate neglect of children, but merely claim some regard for the parent whom it cost previous parents so much to bear, and rear, and train. I protest against this insane waste of human energy, this perpetual renunciation for a race that never comes. When and where will be Itoni that last happy generation who are to rea]) all the fruit of tlie>e ages of sacrifice? Will they wallow in the lost joys of sad women who have rosigiu'd ambitions, and ullow'tHl talents to dull and die in this thankless service? Will they taste all the experience that their motliers consented to forego? Are all tliese things stored np for flunn like teasure that a miser will not spend, though he perish in his garret for lack of warmth and nourishment? Not so. but rather for every los suffered by the fathers the children will be held debtors.

As regards the fears that are entertained on all sides at the prospect of women taking part in political life, or in any occupation which custom has not hitherto recognised as feminine, the advocates of freedom might ask why nobody has hitherto felt the least alarm about the awful nervous strain which the ideal submissive woman has had to undergo from time immemorial in the bearing and rearing of vast families, and the inccesant cares of a household, under conditions, perhaps, of straitened means. Is then anything in the world that causes more nervous exhaustion than such a combination of duties? Doctors are, for once, agreed that worry is the most resistless of all taxes upon the constitution. Monotony of life has the same tendency, and a lack of variety in interests and thought undeniably conduces to the lowering of the vitality. Yet nobody has taken fright at the fatal combination of all these nerve-destroying conditions which belongs essentially to the lot of woman undiw the old regime.

The one sort of strain which seems to he feared for the feminine constitution is the strain of brain-work, although, as a matter of fact, mental effort, if not prolonged and severe, enhances and docs not exhaust the vitality.

It is true it cannot be carried on simultaneously with severe physical exertion of any kind. To go on having children year after year, superintending them and the homo while doing other work outside, would indeed have disastrous consequences for women and fur the race, Init who would wish to see them do anything so insane? Such a domestic treadmill is stupid and brutal enough without the addition of the mental toil. It is the treadmill that must lie modified.

If tlie hew movement liad no otlier etFeet than to rouse women to rebellion against the madness of large families, it would confer a priceless benefit on bniiianity. Let any ix'asonable woman expend t he force that under the old order would have been given to tlie production of, say, the third, fourth, or fifth child upon work of another kind, ninl let lier also take the rest mid enjoyment, whatever her work, that every human being needs. It is certain that the one or t^\o children which such a woman might elect to bear would have cause to be tluinkful that tlieir mother throw over * the holiest traditions of her sex/ and left insane ideas of woman’s duties and functions to her grandmothers.

But there are many modern women who in their own way are quite as foolish as those grandmothers, for lliey are guilty of the madness of trying to live tlie old domestic life, without modification, while entering uptm a larger field of interests, working simultaneously body and brain under conditions of (excitement and worry. This insanity, wLicli one might indc'cd call by a LarslKU* name, will punished as all overstrain is ]>iiuisbed. But (lie euro for these things is not to immerse women more conqiletely in the cares of domestic life, but to simplify its methods, by the aid of a little intelligeiiee and liy means which there is no space to discuss here. The present waste of energy in our homes is simply appalling.

Surely the imprisonment and distortion of the faculties of one sex would be a ruinous price to pay for the jdiysical safety of the race, oven if it secured it, which it does not, but, on the contraiy, places it in peril. If it were r(‘a11y necessary to sacrifice women for this end, then progress would be impossible, for society would nourish within itself the germ of its own destruction. Woman, whose soul had been (liy supposition) sacrificed for ttie sake of her body, must constitute an element/ of reaction and decay which no unaided efforts of man there U iiotldng more \ tins is the reiteratfid proachin" of house-life . . . the constant routine of house-life, the same work, the same thought in the work, the little circum¬ stances daily recurring will dull the keenest edge of work.’--jr^ Sionj of my Heart, by Jefferies. could counteract. The influence, hereditary and personal, which women possess secures to them this terrible revenge.

But there is another consideration in connection with this which Mrs. Lynn Linton overlooks. If the woman is to be asked to surrender so much because she has to produce the succeeding generation, why is the father left altogether out of count ? Does his lih' leave no mark upon his offspring ? Or does Mrs. Lynn Linton, perhaps, think that if the mother takes precautions for their widfarc to the extent of surrendering her whole existeiuie, the father may be safely left t.o take no precautions at all ?

‘The clamour for political rights,’ this lady says, ‘is woman’s confession of sexual enmity, tlloss it over as we may it conies to this in the end. No woman who loves her husliand would usurp his province.’ Might one not n'tort : No man who loves his wife would seek to hamper her freedom or op])Ose her desires ? But in fact, nothing could be moi*e false than the assertion tliat. the new ideals imply sexual enmity. On the contrary, they contcunplate ft relation- sliip between the sexes which is more close and sympathetic than the world has ever seen.

Friendship between husband and wife on the old terms was almost impossible. Where there is power on the one hand and subordination on the other, whatever the relationship that may arise, it is not likely to be that, of friendship. Separate interests and ambitions, minds moving on different planes-—all this tended to make strangers of tlioso who had to pass their lives together, hampered eternally by the false sentiment which made it the right of one to command and the duty of the other to obey. But now, for the first time in history, Ave have come within ineasurahle distance ofa union between man and woman as distinguished from a common liondage. Among the latest words that have been said l)y siuenco on this subject are the following from the Evolution of Sex by Professors Geddes and Thompson ;—

Admitting the theory of evolution, we am not only compelled to hope, but logically compelled to assume, that those rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the ntee‘ have been priM- leged to gatlier, or, it ma^' b(*, to see from distant heights, are \'et the realities of a daily life to which wo and ours may journey.

As for Mrs. Lynn Linton's accusations against the ‘ wild women ’ as regards their lack of principle and even of common honesty, they are surely themselves a little ‘ wild.'

The rest of her charges are equally severe, and they induce one to wonder through what unhappy experiences the lady has gone, since i she. appears never to have encountered a good and generous .woman outside the ranks of her own followers—unless it was a born idiot here and there ! Even the men who disagree with her are either knaves or fools !

I would exhort the ‘ wild women' to be more tolerant, and to admit the truth that they number many wise opponents, as well as many wise and generous supporters, among men. The matter is too. serious to be wrangled about. The adversaries of the ‘ wild woman have hit upon not a few truths in their time, and have done much service in forcing the opposite party to think their position out in all its bearings. From the ‘ wild ’ point of view, of course, their 'conclusions seem false, because they deal with facts, when they find them, without sufficiently comparing and balancing them with other facts, perhaps rather loss obvious, and, above all, without taking into account the one very significant fact that human nature is as sensitive as a weather-glass to its conditions and susceptible of infinite modification.

Mrs. Lynn Linton expresses herself with indignation against the mothers who allow their daughters to have a certain amount of freedom ; ‘ they know,’ she says, ‘ the dangers of life, and from what girls ought to he protected.’ If they disregard the wisdom of experience, on whose soul lies the sin ? Is the wolf to blame who passes through the open fence into the fold ? Yes, certainly he is; the negligence of the shepherd does not turn the wolf into a lamb. But, as a matter of fact, the illustration is not a true one. The social ' wolf’ attacks the lambs only if the lambs exceed the limils of what society expects from them as regards liberty. A girl walking alone in London meets with no trouble, whereas in Paris or Vienna she might run the risk of annoyance. It is clearly in the interests of every one that those limits should be as much as possible extended. The greater number of girls who are allowed this independence the less the risk, and the less the hindrances and difficulties for all concerned. The burden on mothers of an army of daughters who cannot stir from their home without a bodyguard is very severe. Mrs. Lynn Linton does her best to check this tendency, to give more self- reliance to girls, and would throw society back upon its path towards its abandoned errors.

The quarrel, in fact, between Mrs. Lynn Linton and her opponents is simply the time-honoured quarrel between! yesterday and to-day, between reaction and progress, between decaying institutions and the stirrings of a new social faith.

There was a time when Mrs. Lynn Linton had sympathies with the struggle of a soul towards a new faith, but that is all over; and she has no sympathy left for any belief which is not ‘ hallowed by time/ for any attitude of mind (at least in her own sex) that is not unquestioning and submissive.

The world will occupy itself in fighting out the question for a long time to come; and the question will entangle itself inevitably with the great economic problems that this age has to solve, the whole matter of the relation of the sexes being involved in these.

The emancipation of woman and the emancipation of the manual worker will go hand in hand. If this generation is wise and sane, it will conduct then two movements in a fashion new to history. Taking warning by the experience of the past, it will avoid the weak old argument of violence (even in language) as a strong and intelligent teacher avoids the cowardly and senseless device of corporal punishment. It will conduct its revolution by means of the only weapon that has ever given*a victory worth winning : Intelligence.

Mankind has tried blood and thunder long enough; they have not answered. The counter-stroke is as strong as the original impetus, and we expiate our error in the wearisome decades of a reaction. No revolution can be achieved to any purpose that is not organic ; it must rest upon a real change in the sentiment and con¬ stitution of humanity. We are not governed by armies and police, we are governed by ideas; and this power that lies in human opinion is becoming strengthened with every advance that we make in civilisation, and in the rapidity with which ideas are communicated from, man to man, and from nation to nation. The whole course of civilisation tends towards the dethronement of brute force in favour of the force of thought and of sentiment. It behooves women, above all, to conduct their movement in a quiet, steady, philosophic, and genial spirit; regarding the opposition that they receive, as much as possible, from the point of view' of the student rather than of the partisan ; realising that in this greatest of all social revolutions they must expect the fiercest resistance; that men in opposing them are neither better nor worse than all human beings of either sex have shown themselves to be as soon as they became possessors of power over their fellows. The noblest cannot stand the test, and of average men nd women it makes bullies and tyrants. If this general fact be borne hi mind throughout the struggle, it will be easier to avoid the feelings of bitterness and rancour which the sense of injustice creates; it will remind those engaged in the encounter to regard it with calmer eyes, as one would regard the history of past events; it will teach them to be prepared for defeat while hoping for success, and not to be too much dismayed if the change for which they have striven so hard must be delayed until long after they are dead, and all those who would have rejoiced in it are no longer there to sec the sun rise over the promised land. It will teach them, too, to realise more strongly than most of us are inclined to do, that men and women are brothers and sisters, bound to stand or fall together; that in trying to raise the position and condition of women, they are serving at least as much the men who are to be their husbands or sons; that, in short—to quote the saying of Hegel—‘ The master does not become really free till he has liberated his slave.’

Mona Caird.

When woman revolts against her normal functions and sphere of action, desiring instead to usurp man's prerogatives, she entails upon herself the inevitable penalty of such irregular conduct, and, while losing the womanliness which she apparently scorns, fails to attain the manliness for which she strives. But, unmindful of the frowns of her observers, she is unto herself a perpetual delight, calling herself and her kind by the epithets "new," "awakened," and "superior," and speaking disdainfully of women who differ from her in what, to her judgment, is the all-important question of life—" Shall women vote or not?" To enumerate her foibles is a dangerous task, for what she asserts to-day she will deny to-morrow. She is a stranger to logic, and when consistency was given to mortals the New Woman was conspicuously absent Her egotism is boundless. She boaste that she has discovered herself, and says it is the greatest discovery of the century. She has christened herself the "new," but when her opponent speaks of her by that name she replies with characteristic contrariety that the New Woman, like the sea-serpent, is largely an imaginary creature. Nevertheless, in the next sentence, she will refer to herself by her favorite cognomen. She has made many strange statements, and one question she often asks is, "What has changed woman's outlook so that she now desires that of which her grandmother did not dream?" Within the past forty years woman has demanded of man much that he has graciously granted her. She wanted equality with him, and it has been given her in all things for which she is fitted and which will not lower the high standard of womanhood that he desires for her. This she accepts without relinquishing any of the chivalrous attentions which man always bestows upon her. The New Woman tells us that "an ounce of justice is of more value to woman than a ton of chivalry." But, when she obtains her " ounce of justice," she apparently still makes rigorous demands that her "ton of chivalry" be not omitted. Woman asked to work by man's side and on his level; and to-day she has the chance of so doing. The fields of knowledge and opportunity have been opened to her; and she still "desires that of order for the massacre of St Bartholomew. This crime, which she which her grandmother did not dream," because, like an over-indulged child, so long as she is denied one privilege, that privilege she desires above all others. She has decided that without the ballot she can do nothing, for, in her vocabulary, ballot is synonymous with power. The New Woman is oftentimes the victim of strange hallucinations. She persists in calling herself a "slave," despite her high position and great opportunities; and she maintains that, because she cannot vote, she is classed with lunatics and idiots,—until those who are weary of hearing her constant iterations of these themes feel that, if the classification were true, it might not be unjust Still, it has not been clearly shown that withholding the ballot from woman, in common with lunatics and idiots, necessarily makes her one. Women and cripples are exempt from working on roads; does it follow that all women are cripples? Is a woman a bird because she walks on two legs? This hackneyed cry about lunatics and idiots, which has been uttered by nearly all writers and speakers favoring woman suffrage, appeals to prejudice rather than intelligence. If the would-be female politicians—ignoring woman's great opportunities, especial privileges, and the silent testimony of countless happy wives,—choose to consider themselves "slaves," and to announce whenever they speak that they are classed with lunatics and idiots because they are denied the ballot, they are certainly entitled to all the enjoyment they can get out of the delusion. Sensible people know that such statements are false. The New Woman says that a "mother's prerogative ends at the garden gate "; but common sense replies that no mother's prerogative ends there. A mother's prerogative is to govern and direct her child; and there is no child that does not carry through life his or her mother's influence. Let that influence be good or bad, it is always present. Any mother can make, if she will, her power over her child "stronger than the seas of earth, and purer than the air of heaven "; and she needs no especial legislative act to accomplish her work. If woman does not make the laws, she trains and educates those who do, and thus is indirectly responsible for all legislation. The plea which these women make, that they need the ballot for the protection of their homes, is self-contradictory. Has the New Woman never heard that "to teach early is to engrave on marble"? If she would devote some of the time in which she struggles to obtain the ballot to rational reflection on the influence a woman has over the pre-natal life of a child, and would then consider what a mother may do with a plastic human life,—say during the first seven years of its existence and before it goes out to be contaminated by the evil influences of the world, she would then find that ballots are not what women need for the protection of their homes. But the faculty of logically reasoning from cause to effect has never been characteristic of the New Woman. She laments because government is deprived, by lack of equal suffrage, of the "keen moral sense that is native to women as a class."Since all the people in the world are born of women and trained by women, it is difficult to see how government, or anything else, lacks woman's "keen moral sense." Can women make no use of their moral sense without the ballot? It is a chronic grievance with the New Woman that she is taxed without representation. She scorns to be represented by the sons she has reared, or by the men who come under her immediate influence. These she pronounces unworthy and considers incapable of doing her justice. But when she is told that, if women vote, they should also bear the burdens of war in case of necessity, she replies with her usual inconsistency, "She who bears soldiers need not bear arms." She has not the aversion to being represented by men on the field of battle that she has to being represented by them in legislative halls and at the ballot-box. She greatly deprecates man's selfishness and tyranny, as exhibited in human history. But she has come vaunting into the arena with " woman's clubs" and "conventions" and "leagues " and "tribunes " and "signals." If a periodical be not wholly devoted to women, they demand that it must at least have its "woman's column" wherein they may chronicle the most insignificant acts of the sex. The New Woman tells us that the present century is her own; and, indeed, she approaches the truth in this instance. She has promised us a " Woman's Bible," and she has shown that even the Infinite Father does not escape her jealousy, for she has discovered that we should pray to a "Heavenly Mother" as well as to a Heavenly Father. She informs us that the Pilgrim Fathers are no more, and adds, "There stepped on Plymouth Rock, on the bleak shores of New England, thirty-two women accompanied by sixty-nine men and chil- dren." At expositions she must have a "woman's building," wherein she may glorify the work of her brain and hand. No work done by man can be placed beside hers for examination or competition. Surely she furnishes a noteworthy example of modesty and self-abnegation for the benefit of the tyrant man! An illustration of the New Woman's fallacious judgment is shown by her belief that all opponents of equal suffrage are controlled by brewers and liquor dealers. "Sold to the liquor interest" is the cry she always utters when she detects a note of opposition. Now, it is entirely probable that some may object to the extension of the franchise to women and, at the same time, lead thoroughly temperate lives and work for the promotion of temperance. The word temperance means more than total abstinence from intoxicating drinks, and the New Woman has not yet proved that a vote by a woman means a vote for temperance principles. "Woman's vote will purify politics." This is her favorite cry. Not long since a prominent equal-suffrage lecturer, while earnestly setting forth this claim, and enlarging on the shameless manner in which men conduct elections, declared that woman's chaste and refined influence was the only thing that could change the present undesirable condition of affairs. She was not ashamed, however, to relate, before the close of her lecture, that, a short time previous, her sister had induced the family's hired man to vote for a certain measure by presenting him, on the eve of election, with a half-dozen new shirts, made by her own hands. The absurdity of this incident reached a climax when it was noticed that, in a large audience of women, few saw anything wrong in female bribery. The fair speaker omitted to inform her audience whether or not this was to be the prevailing mode of political purification, when one half of the burdens of state rest on female shoulders. But, as women never lack expedients, some purifying process, less laborious than shirt-making, may soon be devised. The New Woman requests that the opponents of equal suffrage open their "dust-covered histories" and therein read of examples of famous women of the past whose lives forever silence all arguments against granting the ballot to woman. Let it be remembered that the New Woman's greatest grievance, since her earliest advent, is the lack of woman's power. Without the ballot woman can do nothing. "Bricks without straw,—that has been the doom of woman throughout the ages," is her disconsolate wail . An extremely brilliant New Woman rarely makes a speech without saying, "Women will enter every place on the round earth, and they will purify every place they enter." With these statements in mind, by all means let the "dust-covered histories" be opened so that we may see the "bricks without straw" which the women "without power" have made, and the manner in which they have purified every place they have entered. Catherine de Medici prevailed on Charles IX of France to give the order for the massacre of St Bartholomew. This crime, which she boasted of to Catholics and excused to Protestants, greatly increased her power, which she used unscrupulously, even conniving at the murder of her own son when she considered him an obstacle to her advancement. She died amid the fierce strife of wars, which she had caused,her use of political power having been only an injury to the world. Madame de Maintenon, using the power which she so long exer- cised over Louis XIV, instigated the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Its most odious features were her especial work. She had been false to her native creed; and she was determined that her fellow Protestants should be equally false. She drove from the shores of France many of its best and most intelligent people. All the bloody history of that period was the result of one woman's work. During the reign of Louis XV of France the court was under the absolute dominion of women, yet none of the instances of ancient and modern immorality presents such an astounding display of individual and national corruption as do those of the time when Madame de Pompadour ruled the king of France. She did nothing for the alleviation of human wretchedness during those twenty years of power and splendid opportunity. She was largely to blame for the evils in church and state which caused the revolution and overturned all in one common ruin. It may be urged that no good woman would have been raised to power by such means as she accepted; and consequently no good could be hoped for from her. But she and her successor, Madame Du Barry, furnish proof that there are women whose advancement to high positions would only increase evil influences; and there are many such who would quickly seize the enlarged opportunities of suffrage, while many good women, engrossed with home cares, would be indifferent to the ballot Woman's record in the first French revolution was one of cruelty and horror. The "Patriot Knitters," as they were called, could shriek or knit according to the requirements of the case. They could also urge men to deeds of violence; and could themselves do violent deeds. Carlyle said that these women had exchanged the "distaff for the dagger." If they had kept the distaff and let the dagger alone France would have lost nothing in the way of political advancement, and might have been spared much of her horrifying history. There was an entire absence of any political purification in their influence. There is no name in history of which women boast more than that of Queen Elizabeth, always quoting her in evidence of what women might do, could they be intrusted with affairs of state. Froude, in summing up his exhaustive work on the time of Queen Elizabeth, wrote :—

"The great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy which was not her own, and which she starved and mutilated when energy and completeness were needed. She was remorseless when she ought to have been most forbearing, and lenient when she ought to have been stern. She owed her safety and success to the incapacity and divisions of her enemies, rather than to wisdom and resolution of her own."

Humiliating as it may be to those women who clamor for a voice in national affairs, the historical truth is, that the splendors of the Elizabethan age were due to her ministers, Burleigh and Walsingham. Catherine II of Russia is also a great favorite with the New Woman. One of them has said, "Next to the great Peter, she was the ablest administrator Russia has ever known." In the life and reign of Catherine II, Empress of Russia—she who became such through the murder of her husband, in which crime she had borne full well her share,— there is but little to admire or emulate. She was unquestionably a woman of great talents and energy, but her morals were no better than Madame de Pompadour's. These examples and many more may be found in the "dust-covered histories." But, if the New Woman will read history with honest eyes, she can never find that women have ever lacked power; neither can she prove that in the past they have purified all the places they have entered; what authority, then, has she for the statement that they would purify every place they may enter in the future? Woman was endowed by her Creator with marvellous power, and, from the time of our first parents until now, that power has been a "savour of life unto life, or of death unto death," as has been eminently manifested in the teachings of history and the experience of human life. The New Woman has a mania for reform movements. No sooner does she descry an evil than she immediately moves against it with some sort of an organized force. This is very noble of her,—if she have no other duties to perform. It would be more gratifying if her organizations met with greater success; but alas! her efforts, mighty as they are, usually represent just so much valuable time wasted. The evils remain, and continue to increase. She disdains to inquire into the cause of her numerous failures, and moves serenely on bent upon reforming everything she imagines to be wrong. When she gets the ballot all will be well with the world, and for that day she works and waits. But if the New Woman or any other woman neglects private duties for public works, her reform efforts are not noble, but extremely unworthy of her; for the " duty which lies nearest" is still the most sacred of duties. Possibly the many Mrs. Jellybys of the present day and the undue interest in "Borrioboola-gha" may have something to do with so much being wrong in the average home and with the average individual. When we read of women assembling together, parading streets, and entering saloons to create, as they say, "a public sentiment for temperance," it is but natural to ask, What are the children of such mothers doing in the meantime? And it will not be strange if many of them become drunkards for the coming generation of reformers to struggle with. The New Woman refuses to believe that duty, like charity, begins at home, and cannot see that the most effectual way to keep clean is not to allow dirt to accumulate. The New Woman professes to believe that all women are good and will use their influence for noble ends,—when they are allowed the right of suffrage. This theory is extremely pleasant, if it were only demonstrable; but here, as elsewhere, it is folly to ignore the incontro- vertible facts. Woman cannot shirk her responsibility for the sins of the earth. It is easy for her to say that men are bad; that, as a class, they are worse than women. But who trained these bad men? Was it not woman? Herein lies the inconsistency of women—striving for a chance to do good when the opportunity is inherently theirs. It is only when they have neglected to train the saplings aright that the trees are misshapen. It was the New Woman's earliest, and is her latest, foible that woman is superior to man. Perhaps she is. But the question is not one of superiority or inferiority. There is at bottom of all this talk about women nature's inexorable law. Man is man and woman is woman. That was the order of creation and it must so remain. It is idle to compare the sexes in similar things. It is a question of difference, and the "happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

"For woman is not undevelopt man,

But diverse : could we make her as the man,

Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,

Not like to like, but like in difference."

Sentimental and slavish as this may sound to many ears, it is as true as any of the unchanging laws governing the universe, and is the Creator's design for the reproduction and maintenance of the race.

Ella W. Winston.

It can scarcely be disputed, I think, that in the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores : The Workingman and the Woman. The Workingman and the Woman, the New Woman, be it remembered, meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue; and each is convinced that on its own especial W hangs the future of the world. Both he and she want to have their values artificially raised and rated, and a status given to them by favor in lieu of desert. In an age in which persistent clamor is generally crowned by success they have both obtained considerable attention ; is it offensive to say much more of it than either deserves ? Your contributor avers that the Cow-Woman and the Scum-Woman, man understands ; but that the New Woman is above him. The elegance of these appellatives is not calculated to recommend them to readers of either sex ; and as a specimen of style forces one to hint that the New Woman who, we are told, " has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years" might in all these years have studied better models of literary composition. We are farther on told " that the dimmest perception that you maybe mistaken, will save you from making an ass of yourself." It appears that even this dimmest perception has never dawned upon the New Woman. We are farther told that "thinking and thinking" in her solitary sphynx-like contemplation she solved the problem and pre scribed the remedy (the remedy to a problem!); but what this remedy was we are not told, nor did the New Woman apparently disclose it to the rest of womankind, since she still hears them in "sudden and violent upheaval" like "children unable to articulate whimpering for they know not what." It is sad to reflect that they might have been "easily satisfied (at what time?), " but society stormed at them until what was a little wail became convulsive shrieks " ; and we are the New Woman who had "the remedy for the pro immediately produce it. We are not told either in or at what epoch this startling upheaval of volcan took place in which "man merely made himse with his opinions and advice," but apparently wailing and gnashing of teeth since it would seem managed still to remain more masterful than he ou We are further informed that women "have allowed him to arrange the whole social system and manage or m these ages without ever seriously examining his wo to considering whether his abilities and his methods were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task." There is something deliciously comical in the idea just suggested, that man has only been allowed to " manage" the world because woman has graciously refrained from preventing his doing so. But the comic side of this solemn assertion does not for a moment offer itself to the New Woman sitting aloof and aloft in her solitary meditation on the superiority of her sex. For the New Woman there is no such thing as a joke. She has listened without a smile to her enemy's " preachments " ; she has " endured poignant miser she has " meekly bowed her head " when he called her and she has never asked for " any proof of the superiority" which could alone have given him a right to use such nau sions. The truth has all along been in the possession of women; but strange and sad perversity of taste! she has " man than for truth, and so the whole human race has suffered!" "All that is over, however," we are told, a the one hand man has shrunk to his true proport all the time of this shrinkage, been herself expan in a word come to " fancy herself " extremely. So no longer the slightest chance of imposing upon her by his game-cock airs. Man, "having no conception of himself as imperfect" will find this difficult to understand at first; but the New Women "knows his weakness," and will "help him with his morally is in his infancy". There have been times when there was a doubt as to whether he was to be raised to her level, or woman to be lowered to his, but we "have turned that corner at last and now woman holds out a strong hand to the child-man and insists upon helping him up." The child-man (Bismarck ?Herbert Spencer ? Edison ? Gladstone ? Alexander III. ? Lord Dufferin ? the Due d'Aumale ?) the child-man must have his tottering baby steps guided by the New Woman, and he must be taught to live up to his ideals. To live up to an ideal, whether our own or somebody else's, is a painful process; but man must be made to do it. For, oddly enough, we are assured that despite "all his assumption he does not make the best of him self," which is not wonderful if he be still only in his infancy; and he has the incredible stupidity to be blind to the fact that " woman has self-respect and good sense," and that " she does not in the least intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys on the chance of obtaining others." I have written amongst other pens'ees eparses which will some day see the light, the following reflection :

L'cole nouvelle des femmes libres ouble qu'on ne puisse pas a la fait combattre Thomme sur son propre terrain et attendre de lui des politesses, des tendresses et des galanteries. II nefaut pas aux m?me moment prendre de l'homme son chaise a rUniversite" et sa place dans Tomnibus; si on lui arrache son gagnepain, on ne peut pas exiger qu'il offre aussi sa parapluie.

The whole kernel of the question lies in this. Your con tributor says that the New Woman will not surrender her present privileges; i. e., she will still expect the man to stand that she may sit; the man to get wet through that she may use his umbrella. But if she retain these privileges she can only do so by an appeal to his chivalry, i. e., by a confession that she is weaker than he. But she does not want to do this : she wants to get the comforts and concessions due to feebleness, at the same time as she demands the lion's share of power due to superior force alone. It is this overweening and unreasonable grasping at both positions which will end in making her odious to man and in her being probably kicked back roughly by him into the seclusion of a harem. Before me lies an engraving in an illustrated journal of a woman's meeting; whereat a woman is demanding in the name of her sovereign sex the right to vote at political elections. The speaker is middle-aged and plain of feature ; she wears an inverted plate on her head tied on with string her double-chin ; she has balloon-sleeves, a bodice tight ing, a waist of ludicrous dimensions in proportion to her portly person ; she is gesticulating with one hand, of which all the fingers are stuck out in ungraceful defiance of all artistic laws of gesture. Now, why cannot this orator learn to gesticulate and learn to dress, instead of clamoring for a franchise? She violates in her own person every law, alike of common-sense and artistic fitness, and yet comes forward as a fit and proper person to make laws for others. She is an exact representative of her sex.

Woman, whether new or old, has immense fields of culture unfilled, immense areas of influence wholly neglected. She does almost nothing with the resources she possesses, be cause her whole energy is concentrated on desiring and demanding those she has not. She can write and print anything she chooses ; and she. scarcely ever takes the pains to acquire correct grammar or elegance of style before wasting ink and paper. She can paint and model any subjects she chooses, but she imprisons herself in men's at&liers to endeavor to steal their technique and their methods, and thus loses any originality she might possess. Her influence on children might be so great that through them she would practically rule the future of the world ; but she dele gates her influence to the vile school boards if she be poor, and if she be rich to governesses and tutors ; nor does she in ninety nine cases out of a hundred ever attempt to educate or control herself into fitness for the personal exercise of. such influence. Her precept and example in the treatment of the animal creation might be of infinite use in mitigating the hideous tyranny of humanity over them, but she does little or nothing to this effect; she wears dead birds and the skins of dead creatures if she hunts the hare and shoots the pheasant, she drives and rides with more brutal recklessness than men; she watches with delight the strug gles of the dying salmon, of the gralloched deer ; she keeps her horses standing in snow and fog for hours with the muscles of their heads and necks tied up in the torture of the bearing rein ; when asked to do anything for a stray dog, a lame horse, a poor man's donkey, she is very sorry, but she has so many claims on her already ; she never attempts by orders to her household, to her foumisseurs, to her dependents, to obtain some degree of mercy in the treatment of sentient creatures and in the methods of their slaughter.

The immense area which lies open to her in private life is almost entirely uncultivated, yet she wants to be admitted into public life. Public life is already overcrowded, verbose, incompetent, fussy, and foolish enough without the addition of her in her sealskin coat with the dead humming bird on her hat. Woman in public life would exaggerate the failings of men, and would not have even their few excellencies. Their legislation would be, as that of men is too often, the offspring of panic or prejudice ; and she would not put on the drag of common-sense as man frequently does in public assemblies. There would be little to hope from her humanity, nothing from her liberality; for when she is frightened she is more ferocious than he, and when she has power more merciless.

"Men," says your contributor, "deprived us of all proper education and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge." How far is this based on facts ? Could not Lady Jane Grey learn Greek and Latin as she chose ? Could not Hypatia lecture ? Were George Sand or Mrs. Somerville withheld from study ? Could not in every age every woman choose a Corinna or Cordelia as her type ? become either Helen or Penelope ? If the vast majority have not either the mental or physical gifts to become either, that was Nature's fault, not man's. Aspasia and Adelina Patti were born, not made. In all eras and all climes a woman of great genius or of great beauty has done what she chose ; and if the majority of women have led obscure lives, so have the majority of men. The chief part of humanity is insignificant, whether it be male or female. In most people there is very little character indeed, and as little mind. Those who have much never fail to make their marks, be they of which sex they may.

The unfortunate" idea that there is no good education without a college curriculum is as injurious as it is erroneous. The college education may have excellencies for men in its frottement, its preparation for the world, its rough destruction of personal conceit ; but for women it can only be hardening and deforming. If study be delightful to a woman, she will find her way to it as the hart to water brooks. The author of Aurora Leigh was not only always at home, but she was an invalid ; yet she became a fine classic, and found her path to fame. A college would have done nothing to improve her rich and beautiful mind; it might have done much to debase it. The perpetual contact of men with other men may be good for them, but the perpetual contact of women with is very far from good. The publicity of a college mu to a young girl of refined and delicate feeling.

The " Scum-woman" and the " Cow-woman," to elegant phraseology of your contributor, are both of the menace to humankind than the New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weening esti own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous

When scum comes to the surface it renders a grea the substance which it leaves behind it; when the cow yeilds pure nourishment to the young and the suffering, blessed in the realm of nature ; but when the New Woman splutters blistering wrath on mankind she is merel baneful.

The error of the New Woman (as of many an old one) lies in speaking of women as the victims of men, and entirely ignoring the frequency with which men are the victims of women. In nine cases out of ten the first to corrupt the youth is the woman. In nine cases out of ten also she becomes corrupt herself because she likes it. It is all very well to say that prostitutes were at the beginning of their career victims of seduction ; but it is not probable and it is not provable. Love of drink and of finery, and a dislike to work, are the more likely motives and origin. It never seems to occur to the accusers of man that women are just as vicious and as lazy as he is in nine cases out of ten, and need no invitation from him to become so.

A worse prostitution than that of the streets, i. e., that of loveless marriages of convenience, are brought about by women, not by men. In such unions the man always gives much more than he gains, and the woman in almost every instance is per suaded or driven into it by women - her mother, her sisters, her acquaintances. It is rarely that the father interferes to bring about such a marriage.

In even what is called a well-assorted marriage, the man is frequently sacrificed to the woman. As I wrote long ago, Andrea del Sarte's wife has many sisters. Correggio dying of the burden of the family, has many brothers. Men of genius are often dragged to earth by their wives. In our own day a famous statesman is made very ridiculous by his wife ; frequently the female influences brought to bear on him render a man of great and original powers and disinterested character, a time-server, a conventionalist, a mere seeker of place. Woman may help man sometimes, but she certainly more often hinders him. Her self esteem is immense and her self-knowledge very small. I view with dread for the future of the world the power which modern inventions place in the hands of woman. Hitherto her physical weakness has restrained her in a great measure from violent action; but a woman can make a bomb and throw it, can fling vitriol, and fire a repeating revolver as well as any man can. These are precisely the deadly, secret, easily handled modes of warfare and revenge, which will commend themselves to her ferocious feebleness.

Jules Ruchard has written :

" J'ai professe* de l'anatomie pendant des longues ann^es, j'ai passe une bonne partie de ma vie dans les amphitheatres, mais je n'en ai pas moins eprouve* un sentiment penible en trouvant dans toutes les maisons d'education des squilettes d'animaux et des mannequins anatomiques entre les mains des fillette"

I suppose this passage will be considered as an effort " to withhold knowledge from women," but it is one which is full of true wisdom and honorable feeling. When you have taken her into the physiological and chemical laboratories, when you have extinguished pity in her, and given weapons to her dormant cruelty which she can use in secret, you will be hoist with your own petard?your pupil will be your tyrant, and then she will meet with the ultimate fate of all tyrants.

In the pages of this Review a physician has lamented the continually increasing unwillingness of women of the world to bear children, and the consequent increase of ill-health, whilst to avoid child-bearing is being continually preached to the working classes by those who call themselves their friends.

The elegant epithet of Cow-woman implies the contempt with which maternity is viewed by the New Woman who thinks it something fine to vote at vestries, and shout at meetings, and lay bare the spines of living animals, and haul the gasping salmon

it is the difference, not the likeness, of sex which makes the charm of human life. Barry Cornwall wrote long ago:

" As the man beholds the woman, As the woman sees the man; Curiously they note each other, As each other only can.

" Never can the man divest her

Of that mystic charm of sex; Ever must she, gazing on him,

That same mystic charm annex."

That mystic charm will long endure despite the efforts to destroy it of orators in tight stays and balloon sleeves, who scream from platforms, and the beings so justly abhorred of Mrs. Lynn Lynton, who smoke in public carriages and from the waist upward are indistinguishable from the men they profess to despise.

But every word, whether written or spoken, which urges the woman to antagonism against the man, every word which is written or spoken to try and make of her a hybrid, self-contained, opponent of men, makes a rift in the lute to which the world looks for its sweetest music.

The New Woman reminds me of an agriculturist who, dis carding a fine farm of his own, and leaving it to nettles, stones, thistles, and wire-worms, should spend his whole time in demanding neighboring fields which are not his. The New Woman will not even look at the extent of ground indisputably her own, which she leaves unweeded and untilled.

Not to speak of the entire guidance of childhood, which is certainly already chiefly in the hands of woman (and of which her use does not do her much honor), so long as she goes to see one of her own sex dancing in a lion's den, the lions being mean while terrorized by a male brute ; so long as she wears dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats ; so long as she goes to races, steeplechases, coursing and pigeon matches ; so long as she ''walks with the guns"; so long as she goes to see an American lashing horses to death in idiotic contest with velocipedes ; so long as she courtesies before princes and emperors who reward the winners of distance-rides; so long as she receives physiologists in her drawing-rooms, and trusts to them in her maladies ; so long as she invades literature without culture and art without talent; so long as she orders her court-dress in a hurry ; so long as she makes no attempt to interest herself in her servants, in h the poor slaves of her tradespeople ; so long as she s as she does at present without scruple at every bruta spectacle which is considered fashionable; so long a stands nothing of the beauty of meditation, of solitude so long as she is utterly incapable of keeping her so shambles of modern sport, and lifting her daughter above the pestilent miasma of modern society - so long as s can not, or will not either do, or cause to do, any of she has no possible title or capacity to demand the privilege of man.

Ouida

It is amusing as well as interesting to note the pause which the new aspect of the woman question has given to the Bawling Brothers who have hitherto tried to howl down every attempt on the part of our sex to make the world a pleasanter place to live in. That woman should ape man and desire to change places with him was conceivable to him as he stood on the hearth-rug in his lord-and-master-monarch-of-all-I-survey attitude, well inflated with his own conceit; but that she should be content to develop the good material which she finds in herself and be only dissatisfied with the poor quality of that which is being offered to her in man, her mate, must appear to him to be a thing as monstrous as it is unaccountable. "If women don't want to be men, what do they want?" asked the Bawling Brotherhood when the first misgiving of the truth flashed upon them ; and then, to reassure themselves, they pointed to a certain sort of woman in proof of the contention that we were all unsexing ourselves.

It would be as rational for us now to declare that men generally are Bawling Brothers or to adopt the hasty conclusion which makes all men out to be fiends on the one hand and all women fools on the other. We have our Shrieking Sisterhood, as the counterpart of the Bawling Brotherhood. The latter consists of two sorts of men. First of all is he who is satisfied with the cow-kind of woman as being most convenient; it is the threat of any strike among his domestic cattle for more consideration that irritates him into loud and angry protests. The other sort of Bawling Brother is he who is under the influence of the scum of our sex, who knows nothing better than women of that class in and out of society, preys upon them or ruins himself for them, takes his whole tone from them, and judges us all by them. Both the cow-woman and the scum-woman are well with in range of the comprehension of the Bawling Brotherhood, but the new woman is a little above him, and he never even thought of looking up to where she has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years, thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman's-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy.

What she perceived at the outset was the sudden and violent upheaval of the suffering sex in all parts of the world. Women were awaking from their long apathy, and, as they awoke, like healthy hungry children unable to articulate, they began to whimper for they knew not what. They might have been easily satisfied at that time had not society, like an ill-conditioned and ignorant nurse, instead of finding out what they lacked, shaken them and beaten them and stormed at them until what was once a little wail became convulsive shrieks and roused up the whole human househould. Then man, disturbed by the uproar, came upstairs all anger and irritation, and, without waiting to learn what was the matter, added his own old theories to the din, but, finding they did not act rapidly, formed new ones, and made an intolerable nuisance of himself with his opinions and advice. He was in the state of one who cannot comprehend because he has no faculty to perceive the thing in question, and that is why he was so positive. The dimmest perception that you may be mistaken will save you from making an ass of yourself.

We must look upon man's mistakes, however, with some leniency, because we are not blameless in the matter ourselves. We have allowed him to arrange the whole social system and manage or mismanage it all these ages without ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering whether his abilities and his motives were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task. We have listened without a smile to his preachments, about our place in life and all we are good for, on the text that "there is no understanding a woman." We have endured most poignant misery for his sins, and screened him when we should have exposed him and had him punished. We have allowed him to exact all things of us, and have been content to accept the little he grudgingly gave us in return. We have meekly bowed our heads when he called us bad names instead of demanding proofs of the superiority which alone would give him a right to do so. We have listened much edified to man's sermons on the subject of virtue, and have acquiesced uncomplainingly in the convenient arrangement by which this quality has come to be altogether practised for him by us vicariously. We have seen him set up Christ as an example for all men to follow, which argues his belief in the possibility of doing so, and have not only allowed his weakness and hypocrisy in the matter to pass without comment, but, until lately, have not even seen the humor of his pretensions when contrasted with his practices nor held him up to that wholesome ridicule which is a stimulating corrective. Man deprived us of all proper education, and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge. He narrowed our outlook on life so that our view of it should be all distorted, and then declared that our mistaken impression of it proved us to be senseless creatures. He cramped our minds so that there was no room for reason in them, and then made merry at our want of logic. Our divine intuition was not to be controlled by him, but he did his best to damage it by sneering at it as an inferior feminine method of arriving at conclusions ; and finally, after having had his own way until he lost his head completely, he set himself up as a sort of a god and required us to worship him, and, to our eternal shame be it said, we did so. The truth has all along been in us, but we have cared more for man than for truth, and so the whole human race has suffered. We have failed of our effect by neglecting our duty here, and have deserved much of the obloquy that was cast upon us. All that is over now, however, and while on the one hand man has shrunk to his true proportions in our estimation, we, on the other, have been expanding to our own; and now we come confidently forward to maintain, not that this or that was "intended," but that there are in ourselves, in both sexes, possibilities hither to suppressed or abused, which, when properly developed, will supply to either what is lacking in the other.

The man of the future will be better, while the woman will be stronger and wiser. To bring this about is the whole aim and object of the present struggle, and with the discovery of the means lies the solution of the Woman Question. Man, having no conception of himself as imperfect from the woman's point of view, will find this difficult to understand, but we know his weakness, and will be patient with him, and help him with his lesson. It is the woman's place and pride and pleasure to teach the child, and man morally is in his infancy. There have been times when there was a doubt as to whether he was to be raised or woman was to be lowered, but we have turned that corner at last; and now woman holds out a strong hand to the child-man, and insists, but with infinite tenderness and pity, upon helping him up.

He must be taught consistency. There are ideals for him which it is to be presumed that he tacitly agrees to accept when he keeps up an expensive establishment to teach them: let him live up to them. Man's faculty for shirking his own responsibility has been carried to such an extent in the past that, rather than be blamed himself when it did not answer to accuse woman, he imputed the whole consequence of his own misery-making he imputed the whole consequence of his own misery-making peculiarities to God.

But with all his assumption man does not make the most of himself. He has had every advantage of training to increase his insight, for instance, but yet we find him, even at this time of day, unable to perceive that woman has a certain amount of self respect and practical good sense - enough at all events to enable her to use the proverb about the bird in the hand to her own ad vantage. She does not in the least intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys on the chance of obtaining others, especially of the kind which man seems to think she must aspire to as so much more desirable. Woman may be foolish, but her folly has never been greater than man's conceit, and the one is not more disastrous to the understanding than the other. When a man talks about knowing the world and having lived and that sort of thing, he means something objectionable ; in seeing life he generally includes doing wrong; and it is in these respects he is apt to accuse us of wishing to ape him. Of old if a woman ventured to be at all unconventional, man was allowed to slander her with the imputation that she must be abandoned, and he really believed it because with him liberty meant license. He has never accused us of trying to emulate him in any noble, manly quality, because the cultivation of noble qualities has not hitherto been a favorite pursuit of his, not to the extent at least of entering into his calculations and making any perceptible impression on public opinion; and he never, therefore, thought of considering whether it might have attractions for us. The cultivation of noble qualities has been individual rather than general, and the person who practised it is held to be one apart, if not actually eccentric. Man acknowledges that the business of life carried on according to his methods corrodes, and the state of corrosion is a state of decay ; and yet he is fatuous enough to imagine that our ambition must be to lie like him for our own benefit in every public capacity. Heaven help the child to perceive with what travail and sorrow we submit to the heavy obligation, when it is forced upon us by our sense of right, of showing him how things ought to be done.

We have been reproached by Ruskin for shutting ourselves up behind park palings and garden walls, regardless of the waste world that moans in misery without, and that has been too much our attitude ; but the day of our acquiescence is over. There is that in ourselves which forces us out of our apathy ; we have no choice in the matter. When we hear the " Help ! help ! help !" of the desolate and the oppressed, and still more when we see the awful dumb despair of those who have lost even the hope of help, we must respond. This is often inconvenient to man, especially when he has seized upon a defenceless victim whom he would have destroyed had we not come to the rescue ; and so, because it is inconvenient to be exposed and thwarted, he snarls about the end of all true womanliness, cants on the subject of the Sphere, and threatens that if we do not sit still at home with cotton-wool in our ears so that we cannot be stirred into having our sympathies aroused by his victims when they shriek, and with shades over our eyes that we may not see him in his degradation, we shall be afflicted with short hair, coarse skins, unsymmetrical figures, loud voices, tastelessness in dress, and an unattractive appearance and character generally, and then he will not love us any more or marry us. And this is one of the most amusing of his threats, because he has said and proved on so many occasions that he cannot live without us whatever we are. O man ! man ! you are a very funny fellow now we know you ! But take care. The standard of your pleasure and convenience has already ceased to be our conscience. On one point, however, you may reassure yourself. True womanliness is not in danger, and the sacred duties of wife and mother will be all the more honorably performed when women have a reasonable hope of becoming wives and mothers of men. But there is the difficulty. The trouble is not because women are mannish, but because men grow ever more effeminate. Manliness is at a premium now because there is so little of it, and we are accused of aping men in order to conceal the side from which the contrast should evidently be drawn. Man in his manners becomes more and more wanting until we seem to be near the time when there will be nothing left of him but the old Adam, who said, " It wasn't me."

Of course it will be retorted that the past has been improved upon in our day; but that is not a fair comparison. We walk by the electric light: our ancestors had only oil-lamps. We can see what we are doing and where we are going, and should be as much better as we know how to be. But where are our men ? Where is the chivalry, the truth, and affection, the earnest purpose, the plain living, high thinking, and noble self-sacrifice that make a man ? We look in vain among the bulk of our writers even for appreciation of these qualities. With the younger men all that is usually cultivated is that flippant smartness which is synonymous with cheapness. There is such a want of wit amongst them, too, such a lack of variety, such monotony of threadbare subjects worked to death ! Their " comic " papers subsist upon repetitions of those three venerable jests, the mother-in-law, somebody drunk, and an edifying deception successfully practised by an un faithful husband or wife. As they have nothing true so they have nothing new to give us, nothing either to expand the heart or move us to happy mirth. Their ideas of beauty threaten always to be satisfied with the ballet dancer's legs, pretty things enough in their way, but not worth mentioning as an aid to the moral, intellectual, and physical strength that make a man. They are sadly deficient in imagination, too; that old fallacy to which they cling, that because an evil thing has always been, therefore it must always continue, is as much the result of want of imagination as of the man's trick of evading the responsibility of seeing right done in any matter that does not immediately affect his personal comfort. But there is one thing the younger men are specially good at, and that is giving their opinion; this they do to each other's admiration until they verily believe it to be worth something. Yet they do not even know where we are in the history of the world. One of them only lately, doubt less by way of ingratiating himself with the rest of the Bawling Brotherhood, actually proposed to reintroduce the Acts of the Apostles-of-the-Pavements ; he was apparently quite unaware of the fact that the mothers of the English race are too strong to allow themselves to be insulted by the reimposition of another most shocking degradation upon their sex. Let him who is responsible for the economic position which forces women down be punished for the consequence. If any are unaware of cause and effect in that matter, let them read The Struggle for Life which the young master wrote in Wreckage. As the workingman says with Christ-like compassion: " They wouldn't be there, poor things, if they were not driven to it."

There are upwards of a hundred thousand women in London doomed to damnation by the written law of man if they dare to die, and to infamy for a livelihood if they must live; yet the man at the head of affairs wonders what it is that we with the power are protesting against in the name of our sex. But is there any wonder we women wail for the dearth of manliness when we find men from end to end of their rotten social system forever doing the most cowardly deed in their own code, striking at the defenceless woman, especially when she is down ?

The Bawling Brotherhood have been seeing reflections of themselves lately which did not flatter them, but their conceit survives, and they cling confidently to the delusion that they are truly all that is admirable, and it is the mirror that is in fault. Mirrors may be either a distorting or a flattering medium, but women do not care to see life any longer in a glass darkly. Let there be light. We suffer in the first shock of it. We shriek in horror at what we discover when it is turned on that which was hidden away in dark corners ; but the first principle of good housekeeping is to have no dark corners, and as we recover ourselves we go to work with a will to sweep them out. It is for us to set the human household in order, to see to it that all is clean and sweet and comfortable for the men who are fit to help us to make home in it. We are bound to raise the dust while we are at work, but only those who are in it will suffer any inconvenience from it, and the self-sufficing and self-supporting are not afraid. For the rest it will be all benefits. The Woman Question is the Marriage Question, as shall be shown hereafter.

SARAH GRAND.