NOTES, &c. (continued 3)

“Second, let the two sexes settle matters among themselves, as far as intellect is concerned, as men now settle matters among themselves, without imposing on each other any disability. Those of both sexes who are weak will soon find their intellectual level; and those of both sexes who 154are strong will soon come to the front.”—Emanuel Bonavia, M.D. (“Woman’s Frontal Lobes”).

XXXIX.

2.—“... equal power of rule ...”

“Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men; ...

Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

Where the city of the best bodied mothers stands,

There the great city stands.”

—Walt Whitman (“Song of the Broad Axe”).

3.—“Her voice in council and in senate ...”

“Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban on one half of mankind and refusing beforehand to make their faculties available, however distinguished they may be? And even if we could do without them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny to them the equal right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their 155own risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them, it is shared by those who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not them only, but all who employ physicians, or advocates, or elect members of parliament.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 94).

4.—“... harmonising word ...”

“... the main reason why so many thoughtful women now claim direct Parliamentary representation is an unselfish one. They desire to take their full share in the service of the race; to help to solve those grave social problems now so urgently pressing, and which demand for their solution the combined resources of the wisdom, experience, and heart of both halves of humanity. They know that the time is fast coming—if, indeed, it be not already come—which will need for its direction and control something more than diplomatic cleverness or political manœuvring, which will demand the clearer conscience and the more sensitive perception of justice born of imaginative sympathy. It is because they hope and believe that in virtue of their faculty of motherhood they can contribute somewhat of these elements to the world’s well-being, and can thus speed its progress towards a nobler future, that they claim full right and power to follow and fulfil their highest conceptions of duty.”—Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme Elmy (“The Decision in the Clitheroe Case and its Consequences,” p. 17).

1567.—“Self-reverent each and reverencing each.”

—A line from Part VII. of Tennyson’s “Princess.”

Id.... “The exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of generosity than those of the old, but it no longer entirely depends on them. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must be justice and prudence; the respect of each for the rights of every other, and the ability of each to take care of himself.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 159).

XL.

1.—“... but a slave himself ...”

“The domination of either sex over the other paralyses the dominion of either.”—Ellen Sarah, Lady Bowyer (Letter to Daily News, 24th October, 1891).

Id....

“Can man be free if woman be a slave?

Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air

To the corruption of a closed grave!

Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear

Scorn, heavier far than toil or anguish, dare

To trample their oppressors?”

—Shelley (“The Revolt of Islam,” Canto 2, s. xliii.).

2.—“... she to shape her own career be free ...”

“Not less wrong—perhaps even more foolishly wrong—is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and 157servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude. This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors, respecting her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave.”—John Ruskin (“Of Queens’ Gardens,” p. 125).

4.—“Free mistress of her person’s sacred plan.”

Eliza W. Farnham (in “Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 92) clearly enunciates the depth of degradation and slavery from which woman’s person must be freed:—“When this mastery is established, and ownership of her becomes a fixed fact, she who was worshipped, vowed to as an idol, deferred to as a mistress, required to conform herself to nothing except the very pleasant requirement that she should take her own way in everything; to come and go, to accept or reject, to do or not, at her own supreme pleasure—this being may find herself awaking in a state of subjection which deprives her of the most sacred right to her own person—makes her the slave of an exacting demand that ignores the conditions, emotions, susceptibilities, pains, and pleasures of her life, as tyrannically and systematically as if she were indeed an insensate chattel.”

Happily, as far as England is concerned, our law no longer lends its power to enforce such a position.

5.—“Free human soul ...”

Woman’s deep and wholesome impulse and yearning for individual freedom and selfdom is well-spoken in the following lines, by an anonymous writer; touchingly shown 158also is the unsufficingness to her soul of even the most honeyed of unequal positions:—

“Oh, to be alone!

To escape from the work, the play,

The talking every day;

To escape from all I have done,

And all that remains to do.

To escape—yes, even from you,

My only love, and be

Alone and free.

Could I only stand

Between gray moor and gray sky,

Where the winds and the plovers cry,

And no man is at hand;

And feel the free wind blow

On my rain-wet face, and know

I am free—not yours, but my own—

Free, and alone!

For the soft firelight

And the home of your heart, my dear,

They hurt, being always here.

I want to stand upright,

And to cool my eyes in the air,

And to see how my back can bear

Burdens—to try, to know,

To learn, to grow!

I am only you!

I am yours, part of you, your wife!

And I have no other life.

I cannot think, cannot do;

I cannot breathe, cannot see;

There is ‘us,’ but there is not ‘me’:—

And worst, at your kiss I grow

Contented so.”

7.—“From woman slave can come but menial race,”

“If the result to the family is such as I have described 159what must be the effect on the race? A slow but sure degeneration. And has this not taken place? Is the race now such as you read of it in early times before the Mogul invasion brought the Zenana and child-marriage in its train? Where are the Rajputs and the Mahrattas with their manly exercises and their mental vigour? For centuries you have been children of children, and there is no surer way of becoming servants of servants.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos,” p. 9).

Id.... “If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot.”—Mary Wollstonecraft (Letter to Talleyrand).

8.—“The mother free confers her freedom and her grace.”

“The child follows the blood of the mother; the son of a slave or serf father and a noble woman is noble. ‘It is the womb which dyes the child,’ they say in their primitive language.... ‘The woman bears the clan,’ say the Wyandot Indians, just as our ancestors said ‘The womb dyes the child!’”—Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Ch. XI., XVII.).

XLI.

1.—“By her the progress of our future kind.”

“What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be

To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave?”

—William Blake (“Jerusalem”).

Id.... “The application of the Pfeiffer bequest, ‘for 160charitable and educational purposes in favour of women,’ has been delayed by legal difficulties, but the Attorney General has now submitted to the Court of Chancery a first list of awards. Details given in the Journal of Education show that Girton and Newnham Colleges receive £5,000 each, whilst Bedford College, Somerville Hall, the New Hospital for Women, the Maria Grey Training College, and a number of other institutions benefit by slightly smaller sums. The bequests will doubtless be welcomed by the recipients, for all the institutions included so far are doing useful work with very inadequate means, and it is to be hoped that the generous example of the London merchant and his literary wife will be often followed in the future. Women’s education—and girls’, too, for that matter—in this country is almost unendowed, and is yet expected to produce results equal to those gained in the richly endowed foundations for boys and men. The interest of the Pfeiffer bequest, however, lies rather in the spirit that prompted it and in the views of progress held by the donors than in the generosity of the gift or the precise manner of its distribution. In a letter explaining his wishes, Mr. Pfeiffer remarks:—

“I have always had and am adhering to the idea of leaving the bulk of my property in England for charitable and educational purposes in favour of women. Theirs is, to my mind, the great influence of the future. Education and culture and responsibility in more than one direction, including that of politics, will gradually fit them for the exercise of every power that could possibly work towards the regeneration of mankind. It is women who have hitherto had the worst of life, but their interest, and with their interest that of humanity, is secured, and I therefore am determined to help them to the best of my ability and means.”—Manchester Guardian, June 7th, 1892.

“Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not 161make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws; the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form.”—Emerson (Essay on Fate).

Id.... “The British race cannot afford to dispense with all the advantage that may be in embryo in the future female intellect, because men and some women are found who declare that women are intellectually inferior.... No amount of prayers and wishes and submitting to God’s will are of any avail. You must use the organs of the intellect in order, not only to increase their efficiency, but to prevent their going from bad to worse. It might here be noted, that because the British people might choose to be satisfied with atrophy of the intellect lobes in their mothers, it will not at all follow that other nations will do so also. If such things as nations exist, there will always be rivalry and competition, and depend upon it those will be first whose mothers generally possess the most efficient intellect lobes.... Fortunately we have learnt another great lesson, evolved by Charles Darwin’s frontal lobes, and that is, that there is no such thing as a fixed and unalterable tissue or organism anywhere. All organisms and parts of organisms are changeable. Everything—organ and organism—has changed in the past, is 162changing in the present, and will change in the future in accordance with the conditions that surround it. Women’s frontal lobes and grey matter will certainly be no exception to the rule. Emancipation, keeping her eyes open, and thinking for herself are the three main things she has to keep hammering at, until the lords of creation see that they are the right things to do, to save future generations from universal imbecility.”—E. Bonavia, M.D. (“Woman’s Frontal Lobes”).

2.—“Their stalwart body and their spacious mind;”

“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

How shall men grow?”

—Tennyson (“The Princess,” Canto 7).

XLIII.

8.—“Where lies her richest gift, ...”

“As I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities 163which would unfold themselves.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 104).

XLIV.

4.—“... the freeman, equable ...”

“The freeman assuredly scorns equally to insult and to be insulted.”—Alexander Walker (“Woman as to Mind,” p. 205).

XLV.

2.—“... equal freedom, equal fate ...”

“As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one half of these creatures and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.”—Sydney Smith (“Female Education”).

Id.... “Was it Mary Somerville who had to hide her books, and study her mathematics by stealth after all the family had gone to sleep, for fear of being scolded and worried because she allowed her intellect full scope? She has now a bust in the Royal Institution!... Whatever view of the case theoretical considerations may suggest, there is one fact beyond cavil, and it is this: that the 164female frontal lobes are not only capable of equalling in power the male lobes, but can surpass them when allowed free scope. This has been recently proved in one of the universities, where a woman surpassed the senior wrangler in mathematics—an essentially intellectual work.”—Dr. Emanuel Bonavia (“Woman’s Frontal Lobes”).

The “girl graduate” last referred to is Miss Philippa Fawcett at the University Examinations, Cambridge, in June, 1890.

3.—“Together reared ...”

“We find a good example in the United States, where, to the horror of learned and unlearned pedants of both sexes, numerous colleges exist in which large numbers of young men and women are educated together. And with what results? President White, of the University of Michigan, expresses himself thus: ‘For some years past a young woman has been the best scholar of the Greek language among 1,300 students; the best student in mathematics in one of the classes of our institution is a young woman, and many of the best scholars in natural and general science are also young women.’ Dr. Fairchild, President of Oberlin College in Ohio, in which over 1,000 students of both sexes study in mixed classes, says: ‘During an experience of eight years as Professor of the ancient languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and in the branches of ethics and philosophy, and during an experience of eleven years in theoretical and applied mathematics, the only difference which I have observed between the sexes was in the manner of their rhetoric.’ Edward H. Machill, President 165of Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, tells us that an experience of four years has forced him to the conclusion that the education of both sexes in common leads to the best moral results. This may be mentioned in passing as a reply to those who imagine such an education must endanger morality.”—Bebel (“Women,” Walther’s Translation, p. 131). (See also Notes to line 7, forward.)

It is of good omen that the precedent thus set in America is finding a following in our own isle also. All honour to the University of St. Andrews, concerning which sundry newspapers of 15th March, 1892, relate that: “The Senatus Academicus of the University of St. Andrews has agreed to open its classes in arts, science, and theology to women, who will be taught along with men. The University will receive next year a sum of over £30,000 to be spent on bursaries, one half of the sum to be devoted to women exclusively. Steps are being taken to secure a hall of residence in which the women students may live while attending the University classes.”

Id.—“... in purity and truth,

Through plastic childhood and retentive youth.”

“Je voudrais que ce petit volume apportât au lecteur un peu de la jouissance que j’ai goûtée en le composant. Il complète mes Souvenirs, et mes souvenirs sont une partie essentielle de mon œuvre. Qu’ils augmentent ou qu’ils diminuent mon autorité philosophique, ils expliquent, ils montrent l’origine de mes jugements, vrais ou faux. Ma mère, avec laquelle j’ai été si pauvre, à côté de laquelle j’ai travaillé des heures, n’interrompant mon travail 166que pour lui dire: ‘Maman, êtes-vous contente de moi?’ mes petites amies d’enfance qui m’enchantaient par leur gentillesse discrète, ma sœur Henriette, si haute, si pure, qui, à vingt ans, m’entraîna dans la voie de la raison et me tendit la main pour franchir un passage difficile, ont embaumé le commencement de ma vie d’un arôme qui durera jusqu’à la mort.”—Ernest Renan (“Souvenirs d’Enfance.”).

5.—“Their mutual sports of sinew and of brain.”

“No boy nor girl should leave school without possessing a grasp of the general character of science, and without having been disciplined more or less in the methods of all sciences; so that when turned into the world to make their own way, they shall be prepared to face scientific problems, not by knowing at once the conditions of every problem, or by being able at once to solve it, but by being familiar with the general current of scientific thought, and by being able to apply the methods of science in the proper way, when they have acquainted themselves with the conditions of the special problem.”—T. H. Huxley (“Essay on Scientific Education”).

And the same learned professor tells us, on another occasion:—“A liberal education is an artificial education which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties. That man, I think,” (shall we not include “woman” also, on his own showing as above?) “has had a liberal education who has 167been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts in equal strength and in smooth working order, ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to every kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature, and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

“Such an one, and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is as completely as a man can be in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother, he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister, and interpreter.”—Id. (“Essay on a Liberal Education.”)

6.—“In strength alike the sturdy comrades train; ...”

How largely strength is simply a matter of training may be instanced by a case or two:—

“The results of practice and training from childhood on the bodily development can be seen in female acrobats and circus riders, who could compete with any man in courage, daring, dexterity, and strength, and whose performances are frequently astonishing.”—Bebel (“Woman,” p. 126).

168“I am a medical man. I have spent several years in Africa, and have seen human nature among tribes whose habits are utterly unlike those of Europe. I had been accustomed to believe that the muscular system of women is necessarily feebler than that of men, and perhaps I might have dogmatised to that effect; but, to my astonishment, I found the African women to be as strong as our men.... Not only did I see the proof of it in their work and in the weights which they lifted, but on examining their arms I found them large and hard beyond all my previous experience. On the contrary, I saw the men of these tribes to be weak, their muscles small and flabby. Both facts are accounted for by the habits of the people. The men are lazy in the extreme; all the hard work is done by the women.”—(Westminster Review, Oct., 1865, p. 355.)

“Les femmes Sphakiotes ne le cèdent en rien aux hommes pour la vigueur et l’énergie. J’ai vu un jour une femme ayant un enfant dans les bras et un sac de farine sur la tête, gravir, malgré ce double fardeau, la pente escarpée qui conduit à Selia.”—Jules Ballot (“Histoire de l’Insurrection Crétoise,” Paris, 1868, p. 251).

Id.... In this context it is pleasant to find in the newspapers such a note as the following:—

“The frost continued throughout West Cheshire yesterday, and skating on rather rough ice was largely enjoyed. At Eaton, where the Duke of Westminster is entertaining a party, the guests had a hockey match on the frozen fish-pond in front of the hall. The players, who kept the game up with spirit for over an hour, included the Duchess of Westminster, the Marquis and Marchioness of Ormonde, Lady Beatrice and 169Lady Constance Buller, Lord Arthur Grosvenor, Lord Gerald Grosvenor, Lady Margaret and Lady Mary Grosvenor, Captain and Mrs. Cawley, Hon. Mrs. Norman Grosvenor, Hon. Mrs. Thomas Grosvenor, General Julian Hall, and party.”—(Manchester Courier, 12th Jan., 1892.)

Later on in the year we read in the journal Woman:—

“At the Marlow Regatta an extremely pretty girl in navy serge, built Eton fashion, was a Miss ——, who wore as an under-bodice a full vest of shaded yellow Indian silk. Her prowess with the oar is the cause of daily admiration to the Marlowites.”

Again, on August 15th, 1892, the Manchester Evening Mail has the following:—

“An ailing ‘navvy,’ who has been engaged in some works near Versailles, was a few days ago admitted to a hospital in that town. Before the sick person had long been in the institution it was discovered that the apparent ‘navvy’ was a woman. The superintendent of the hospital was not in the least surprised on hearing of the transformation scene, for it appears that he is accustomed to deal with many woman patients who enter the hospital in male attire. It is common in the district (says a Paris correspondent) for robust women to don men’s garb in order to obtain remunerative employment as navvies, porters, farm labourers, road menders, or assistants to bricklayers, masons, and builders. It has long been established that the average Frenchwoman of town or country has as great a capacity for work either in counting-houses, shops, fields, or farms as her lord and master has for laziness and lolling in the cafés, playing dominoes, and smoking cigarettes.”

On the preceding day, August 14th, 1892, the St. Petersburg journals reported that:—

“Ces jours-ci sera érigé à Sébastopol le monument élevé en l’honneur des Femmes de cette ville qui, en 1854, ont construit seules une batterie contre les troupes alliées. C’est une pyramide taillée en granit d’une hauteur de cinquante pieds. 170Sur un côté est écrit en lettres d’or: ‘C’est ici que se trouvait la batterie des Femmes’; sur l’autre face les mots suivants sont gravés: ‘A cet endroit, en 1854, les Femmes de Sébastopol ont construit une batterie.’ Le jour de l’inauguration de ce monument n’est pas encore fixé. L’impératrice se fera représenter à l’inauguration par un grand-duc.”

And, in October, 1892, the “sporting” newspapers recorded that:—

“Women are gradually coming to the fore as bicycle riders. Miss Dudley, a well-known rider, has just accomplished a feat which would have seemed wonderful for any rider not long ago. She has ridden from a spot near Hitchin to Lincoln, a distance of 100 miles, in little more than seven hours, or at the average speed of about fourteen miles an hour. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are well-known as tandem riders, and they have won many races together; but this is, perhaps, the first recorded instance of a woman cyclist holding her own so well, unaided, in a long road ride.”

See also “The Lancashire pit-brow women,” Note XVIII., 8.

7.—“Of differing sex no thought inept intrudes,”

“I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men on anatomical subjects, and compared the proportions of the human body with artists—yet such modesty did I meet with that I was never reminded by word or look of my sex, and the absurd rules which make modesty a pharisaical cloak of weakness.”—Mary Wollstonecraft (“The Rights of Woman,” p. 278).

“As a careful observer remarks, true modesty lies in the entire absence of thought upon the subject. Among medical students and artists the nude causes no extraordinary emotion; indeed, Flaxman asserted that the 171students in entering the Academy seemed to hang up their passions along with their hats.”—Westermarck (“History of Human Marriage,” p. 194).

Id.... “This is strikingly exemplified in the curious conversation recorded in Lylie’s ‘Euphues’ and his ‘England,’ edit. 1605, 4to, signature X—Z 2, where young unmarried people of both sexes meet together and discuss without reserve the ticklish metaphysics of love. But though treading on such slippery ground, it is remarkable that they never, even by allusion, fall into grossness. Their delicate propriety is not improbably the effect of their liberty.”—Buckle (“Common-place Book,” No. 856).

8.—“Their purpose calmly sure all errant aim excludes.”

“We point to a present remedy for undergraduate excesses, which, resting on the soundest theory, has also the demonstration of unquestioned fact. It is co-education. Cease to separate human beings because of sex. They are conjoined in the family, in the primary and grammar schools, in society, and, after the degree rewards four years of monastic student existence, in the whole career of life.

“Throw open the doors of Harvard to women on equal terms, absorb the annexe into the college proper, and as the night follows the day, scholarship will rise, and dissipation fall by the law of gravitation. The moral atmosphere will find immediate purification, and the daily association of brothers and sisters in intellectual pursuits impart a breadth of view which is an education in itself. The professors may then be left safely to their themes, John Harvard’s statue may cease to dread defilement, the regent will find 172his censorial duties fully as perfunctory as he seems to have made them in the past, and character will crowd out profligacy.”—William Lloyd Garrison (in Woman’s Journal, Boston, U.S., 6th February, 1892).

“Whatsoever is ultimately decided by the wisdom of ages to be the best possible form of culture for one human nature, must be so for another, for one common humanity lies deeper in all and is more essential in each than any difference.”—Sophia Jex-Blake, M.D.

XLVI.

3.—“... impartial range ...”

Preparation in this direction is going steadily forward, not only in the Western hemisphere, but in the Eastern. It is announced (in August, 1892) that

“Lady students at the five Universities in Switzerland number 224. Berne is the most popular, with 78 female undergraduates; Zurich has 70; Geneva 70; the new University of Lausanne has five; and Basle one. The medical faculty is in most favour with the female students, and counts 157 of the whole number; the philosophical faculty follows with 62; five prefer the faculty of jurisprudence; the theological faculty has not yet been invaded by the sex. More than half of the female students, 116, are Russians, 21 Germans, 21 Swiss, 11 Americans, nine Austrians, seven Bulgarians, four English, three Roumanians, and three from the Turkish Empire, all of whom are young Armenian ladies.”

4.—“... wider wisdom ...”

Such wider wisdom—without the preliminary suffering—as the poet had attained to, when he wrote:—

173“I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past,

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire;

But I hear no yelps of the beast, and the man is quiet at last,

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher.”

—Tennyson (“By an Evolutionist”).

Id.—“... juster ethics, teach; ...”

“For we see that it is possible to interpret the ideals of ethical progress, through love and sociality, co-operation and sacrifice, not as mere utopias contradicted by experience, but as the highest expressions of the central evolutionary process of the natural world.... The older biologists have been primarily anatomists, analysing and comparing the form of the organism, separate and dead; however incompletely, we have sought rather to be physiologists, studying and interpreting the highest and intensest activity of things living.... It is much for our pure natural history to recognise that ‘creation’s final law’ is not struggle, but love.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” pp. 312, 313).

5; 6.—“Conformed to claims of intellect and need,

The tempered numbers of their high-born breed;”

“There is a problem creeping gradually forward upon us, a problem that will have to be solved in time, and that is the steady increase of population.... I believe 174that with the emancipation of women we shall solve this problem now. Fewer children will be born, and those that are born will be of a higher and better physique than the present order of men. The ghastly abortions, which in many parts pass muster nowadays, owing to the unnatural physical conditions of society, as men, women, and children, will make room for a nobler and higher order of beings, who will come to look upon the production of mankind in a diseased or degraded state as a wickedness and unpardonable crime, against which all men and women should fight and strive.”—Lady Florence Dixie (“Gloriana,” p. 137).

Id.... And Mrs. Mona Caird says:—“If the new movement had no other effect than to rouse women to rebellion against the madness of large families, it would confer a priceless benefit on humanity.”—(Nineteenth Century, May, 1892.)

Id.... “To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society.... The fact itself of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom it is bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. And in a country either over-peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence 175against all who live by the remuneration of their labour.”—J. S. Mill (“Liberty,” Chap. V.).

Id.... A. Dumas fils draws a true and piteous picture in which this element of the unintelligent overproduction of human beings has the largest share:—

“Il y a, et c’est la masse, les femmes du peuple et de la campagne suant du matin au soir pour gagner le pain quotidien, faisant ainsi ce que faisaient leurs mères, et mettant au monde, sans savoir pourquoi ni comment, des filles qui, à leur tour, feront comme elles, à moins que, plus jolies, et par conséquent plus insoumises, elles ne sortent du groupe par le chemin tentant et facile de la prostitution, mais où le labeur est encore plus rude. Le dos courbé sous le travail du jour, regardant la terre quand elles marchent, domptées par la misère, vaincues par l’habitude, asservies aux besoins des autres, ces créatures à forme de femme ne supposent que leur condition puisse être modifiée jamais. Elles n’ont pas le temps, elles n’ont jamais eu la faculté de penser et de réfléchir; à peine un souhait vague et bientôt refoulé de quelque chose de mieux! Quand la charge est trop lourde elles tombent, elles geignent comme des animaux terrassés, elles versent de grosses larmes à l’idée de laisser leurs petits sans ressources, ou elles remercient instinctivement la mort, c’est-à-dire le repos dont elles ont tant besoin.” (“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” etc., p. 101.)

Id.... And again, the advanced biological writers say:—

“The statistician will doubtless long continue his fashion of confidently estimating the importance and predicting the survival of populations from their quantity and rate of reproduction 176alone; but at all this, as naturalists, we can only scoff. Even the most conventional exponent of the struggle for existence among us knows, with the barbarian conquerors of old, that ‘the thicker the grass, the easier it is mown,’ that ‘the wolf cares not how many the sheep may be.’ It is the most individuated type that prevails in spite, nay, in another sense, positively because of its slower increase; in a word, the survival of a species or family depends not primarily upon quantity, but upon quality. The future is not to the most numerous population, but to the most individuated....

“Apart from the pressure of population, it is time to be learning (1) That the annual child-bearing still so common, is cruelly exhaustive to the maternal life, and this often in actual duration as well as quality; (2) That it is similarly injurious to the standard of offspring; and hence, (3) That an interval of two clear years between births (some gynæcologists even go as far as three) is due alike to mother and offspring.” (It is to be noted that this period of three years is postulated as a necessity for the well-being of the offspring; it is by no means a recommendation to even a triennial maternity on the part of the mother, who is indeed to be, in all fulness, “free mistress of her person’s sacred plan,” with a duty to herself, as well as to her child). “It is time, therefore, as we heard a brave parson tell his flock lately, ‘to have done with that blasphemous whining which constantly tries to look at a motherless’ (ay, or sometimes even fatherless) ‘crowd of puny infants as a dispensation of mysterious providence.’ Let us frankly face the biological facts, and admit that such cases usually 177illustrate only the extreme organic nemesis of intemperance and improvidence, and these of a kind far more reprehensible than those actions to which common custom applies the names, since they are species-regarding vices, and not merely self-regarding ones, as the others at least primarily are....

“It seems to us, however, essential to recognise that the ideal to be sought after is not merely a controlled rate of increase, but regulated married lives.... We would urge, in fact, the necessity of an ethical rather than of a mechanical ‘prudence after marriage,’ of a temperance recognised to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the unmarried.... Just as we would protest against the dictum of false physicians who preach indulgence rather than restraint, so we must protest against regarding artificial means of preventing fertilisation as adequate solutions of sexual responsibility. After all, the solution is primarily one of temperance. It is no new nor unattainable ideal to retain, throughout married life, a large measure of that self-control which must always form the organic basis of the enthusiasm and idealism of lovers.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” Chap. XX.).

As a fitting exemplification of the words of the “parson” above narrated, compare the following verbatim extract from a conversation in this year of grace 1892. The —— referred to is a man about 35, middle-class, and of “good ‘education’” (!) The same description would also apply to the speaker, who said, “Poor —— is a brave fellow, and keeps up his head in the worst of luck. He has a lot of home troubles; he has lost three children, and his wife always has a bad time at the birth of each baby.”

No word of sympathy for the wife and mother, or even of recognition that it was really she who bore the pain at each 178“bad time.” As the children left alive still numbered two at the time of the speech, the whole incident can but imply—on the part of both actor and speaker—the hideous, even if unconscious, inhumanity so widely prevalent. Never will “high-born breed” be attained till such action of low-bred intellect is reprobated and amended; in accordance with the enunciated truth, that:—

“Especially in higher organisms, a distinction must obviously be drawn between the period at which it is possible for males and females to unite in fertile sexual union, and the period at which such union will naturally occur or will result in the fittest offspring.”—Geddes and Thomson (op. cit., p. 243).

7, 8.—“Not overworn with childward pain and care,

The mother—and the race—robuster health shall share.”

“It is not the true purpose of any intellectual organism to live solely to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty is also to live for its own happiness and well-being. Indeed, in so doing, it will be acting in one of the most certain ways to ensure that faculty and possession of happiness that it aims to secure for its progeny.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).

Id.... Even the placid and precisian American poet bears strong, if involuntary, testimony to the evil and wrong of the non-cultured and untempered begetting of children:—

“She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door;

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain

Left their traces on heart and brain.”

—Whittier (“Maud Müller”).

179Id.... Mr. Andrew Lang also promises us “a world that is glad and clean, and not overthronged and not overdriven.”—(Introduction to “Elizabethan Songs.”)

Id.... “Justice never loses sight of self.... The language of Justice is ‘to Me and to You; or to You and to Me.’ ... We have to learn, for the action and spirit worthy of the coming time, that woman is never to sacrifice herself to a man, but, when needful, to the Manhood she hopes or desires to develop in him. In this she will also attain her own development. But after the hour when her faith in the hope of worthy results fails her (reason instructing her nobler affections by holding candidly in view all the premises, past, present, and future), she is bound by all her higher obligations to bring that career, whether it be of the daughter, sister, mother, wife, or friend, to a close. For the inferior cannot possibly be worth the sacrifice of the superior. True self-sacrifice, which necessarily involves the temporary descent of the nobler to the less noble—the higher to the lower—is made only when the lower is elevated, improved, carried forward in its career, thereby.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 149).

Id.... “I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another; but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.... Woman, self-controlled, would never be absorbed by any relations; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that 180love, a love to woman, is her whole existence; she is also born for truth and love in their universal energy.”—Margaret Fuller Ossoli (“The Woman of the Nineteenth Century”).

Id.... Professor Alfred Russell Wallace has written an article, concerning part of which Mr. W. T. Stead rightly says: “It is a scientific reinforcement of the cause of the emancipation of women, and shows that progress of the cause of female enfranchisement is identified with the progress of humanity.”—(Review of Reviews, Vol. V., p. 177.)

Professor Wallace says:—

“When such social changes have been effected that no woman will be compelled, either by hunger, isolation, or social compulsion, to sell herself, whether in or out of wedlock, and when all women alike shall feel the refining influence of a true humanising education, of beautiful and elevating surroundings, and of a public opinion which shall be founded on the highest aspirations of their age and country, the result will be a form of human selection which will bring about a continuous advance in the average status of the race. Under such conditions, all who are deformed either in body or mind, though they may be able to lead happy and contented lives, will, as a rule, leave no children to inherit their deformity. Even now we find many women who never marry because they have never found the man of their ideal. When no woman will be compelled to marry for a bare living or for a comfortable home, those who remain unmarried from their own free choice will certainly increase, while many others, having no inducement to 181an early marriage, will wait till they meet with a partner who is really congenial to them.

“In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of degraded taste or feeble intellect, will have little chance of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with himself. The most perfect and beautiful in body and mind will, on the other hand, be most sought, and, therefore, be most likely to marry early, the less highly endowed later, and the least gifted in any way the latest of all, and this will be the case with both sexes.

“From this varying age of marriage, as Mr. Galton has shown, there will result a more rapid increase of the former than of the latter, and this cause continuing at work for successive generations will, at length, bring the average man to be the equal of those who are now among the more advanced of the race.”—“Human Progress, Past and Present” (Arena, Jan., 1892).

XLVII.

1.—“Nor blankly epicene ...”

“Bring up a boy and girl side by side, and educate them both for the same profession under the same masters, and a novelist who depicts character could yet weave a story out of the mental and emotional differences between them, which will cause them to look at life from totally opposite points of view.”—Mabel Collins (“On Woman’s Relation to the State”).

2.-“... sequence of that day.”

“We have seen that a deep difference in constitution expresses 182itself in the distinctions between male and female, whether these be physical or mental. The differences may be exaggerated or lessened, but to obliterate them it would be necessary to have all the evolution over again on a new basis. What was decided among the Prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament.”—Geddes and Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).

3, 4.—“... not ... by aping falser sex shall truer grow.”

“While man and woman still are incomplete

I prize that soul where man and woman meet,

Which types all Nature’s male and female plan,

But, friend, man-woman is not woman-man.”

—Tennyson (“On One who Affected an Effeminate Manner”).

XLVIII.

8.—“Happy what each may bring to help the common fate.”

“I would submit to a severe discipline, and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human race in the future. Each one of us should do something, however small, towards that great end.... How pleasant it would be each day to think, to-day I have done something that will tend to render future generations more happy. The very thought would make this hour sweeter. It is absolutely necessary that something of this kind should be discovered.... It should be the sacred and sworn duty of everyone, once at least during lifetime, to do something in person towards this end. It 183would be a delight and a pleasure to me to do some thing every day, were it ever so minute. To reflect that another human being, if at a distance of ten thousand years from the year 1883, would enjoy one hour’s more life, in the sense of fulness of life, in consequence of anything I had done in my little span, would be to me a peace of soul.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp. 129, 131, 160).

XLIX.

1.—“By mutual aid perfecting complex man.”

Kant says: “Man and woman constitute, when united, the whole and entire being, one sex completes the other.”—Bebel (“Woman,” Walther’s Translation, p. 44).

2, 3.—“Their twofold vision human life may scan

From differing standpoints ...”

See Note XLVII., 1.

LI.

4.—“Her brain untutored ...”

“The soldier is exercised in the use of his weapons, the artisan in the use of his tools. Every profession demands a special education, even the monk has his novitiate. Women alone are not prepared for their important maternal duties.”—Irma von Troll-Borostyani (“Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts.” A Study on the Woman Question).

LIII.

2.—“... the quivering nerve ...”

M. Chauveau states that his object was ‘To ascertain 184the excitability of the spinal marrow, and the convulsions and pain produced by that excitability.’ His studies were made chiefly on horses and asses, who, he says, ‘lend themselves marvellously thereto by the large volume of their spinal marrow.’ M. Chauveau accordingly ‘consecrated eighty subjects to his purpose.’ ‘The animal,’ he says, ‘is fixed upon a table. An incision is made on its back about fourteen inches long; the vertebræ are opened with the help of a chisel, mallet, and pincers, and the spinal marrow is exposed.’ (No mention is made of anæsthetics, which of course would nullify the experimenter’s object of studying “the excitability of the spinal marrow, and the convulsions and pain produced by that excitability.”) “M. Chauveau gives a large number of his cases.... Case 7: ‘A vigorous mule. When one pricks the marrow near the line of emergence of the sensitive nerves, the animal manifests the most violent pain.’ Case 20: ‘An old white horse, lying on the litter, unable to rise, but nevertheless very sensitive. At whatever points I scratch the posterior cord I provoke signs of the most violent suffering.’”—(Journal de Physiologie, du Dr. Brown-Séquard. Tome Quatrième. No. XIII.)

4.—“... living butchery with learned knife.”

“We are told what Professor Brücke says with reference to section of the trigeminus:—‘The first sign that the trigeminus is divided is a loud piercing cry from the animal. Rabbits we know,’ he adds, ‘are not very sensitive; all sorts of things may be done to them without making them utter a cry; but in this operation, if it succeeds, they invariably 185send forth a prolonged shriek.’”—“Lectures on Physiology,” Vol. II., p. 76.

5.—“... cruel anodyne that chained the will ...”

It is dubious whether curare be even an anodyne, i.e. a deadener of pain. M. Claude Bernard, himself a vivisector, says:—“Curare acting on the nervous system only suppresses the action of the motor nerves, leaving sensation intact. Curare is not an anæsthetic.” (Revue Scientifique, 1871–2, p. 892.)

6.—“... the shuddering victim conscious still.”

“Everyone has heard of the dog, suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.”—Darwin (“The Descent of Man,” Part I., Chap. II.).

8.—“Nor yields her holiest truths on such a murderer’s rack.”

“It is fit to say here, once for all, that laws which govern the animal kingdom below the human, can no more be accepted as final and determining to man, in physiological, than in intellectual and moral, action.... For neither the knife of the anatomist, nor the lens of the microscopist, are infallible interpreters of function. We do not possess ourselves of all of Nature’s secrets by cutting up her tissues and fabrics, neither by the keenest inspection of their ultimate atoms, whether fluid or solid. There are some truths withheld from the investigator, however brave, patient, 186and nice his methods and means, which are given up, in due time, to the truth-seer, without any method or means, save the intuitive faculty and its unambitious, guileless surrender to the service offered it. Such, it is at least possible, we may find has been Nature’s dealing in this occult department.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. I., pp. 47, 50).

LIV.

1.—“True science finds its own by kindlier quest.”

“Science is of the utmost importance to mankind, but the last degree of importance cannot be said to attach to all its minute discoveries, and where, as in physiology, the investigation becomes inhuman, there it ought to stop. It ought to stop for our own sakes if from no other motive, for the torturing of animals on the chance that it may suggest the means of alleviating some of our own pains helps to blunt those sensibilities which afford us some of our purest pleasures. Animals are not our equals in all things, but they seem to be at any rate our equals in the sense of pain. The want of imagination may deprive it in their case of some of its poignancy, but on the other hand they have none of the supports which we derive from reason and sympathy, from the tenderness of friendship and the consolations of religion. With them it is pure, unmitigated, unsolaced suffering. Our duties to them form a neglected chapter in the code of ethics, but we ought not to torture them, and there are many who will maintain that the obligation is absolute. Life is no doubt valuable, but it is not everything. It is more than meat, as the body 187is more than raiment, but it is not more than humanity. There are occasions on which it has to be risked, and there are terms on which men of honour and patriotism would hold it worthless. The doctrine that we may subject the lower animals to incredible suffering on the possibility that it may save ourselves from an additional pang is of a selfish and degrading tendency. It helps to lower the ‘moral ideal’ and to weaken the springs of heroism in human character. We owe it to ourselves to keep clear of this peril. Nature surrounds us with limitations. Here is one which all that is best and noblest in us sets up, and it is more sacred than those over which we have no control. We refuse to torture other sentient creatures in order that we may live.”—Dr. Henry Dunckley (Manchester Guardian, August 9th, 1892).

The above noble pronouncement, with its conclusion, is instinct with the spirit of true science (which repudiates with disdain and horror the hypocritical pseudo-science of a ghastly and demoralising study and pursuit of cruelty),—the true science which is one with love, because it refuses the acceptance of life itself on terms of outrage to love.

See Note LXI., 3.

4.—“... a keener lens of man’s own brain.”

“Observation is perhaps more powerful an organon than either experiment or empiricism.”—Richard Jefferies (“Story of My Heart,” p. 162).

Id.... It is well that some English physicists of the fullest scientific impulse and effort are revolted at the inhuman and bootless cruelty of the foreign medical schools 188which masquerades as scientific research. Is it not possibly something more than a coincidence that vivisectionists in general exhibit an aversion to the equality of woman, and that vivisection flourishes more unrestrainedly where her position and influence are less recognised; i.e., in plain words,—in a lower civilisation?

Mr. Lawson Tait says, with the indignation of a truly scientific mind at these methods of “science falsely so called”:—

“For one, as intimately and widely concerned in the application of human knowledge for the saving of human life and the relief of human suffering as anyone can be, or as anyone has ever been, I say I am grateful for the restrictive legislation. Let me give one brief illustration of my most recent experience in this matter as one of hundreds which confirm me in my determination persistently to oppose the introduction into England of what passes for science in Germany. Some few years ago I began to deal with one of the most dreadful calamities to which humanity is subject by means of an operation which had been scientifically proposed nearly two hundred years ago. I mean ectopic gestation. The rationale of the proposed operation was fully explained about fifty years ago, but the whole physiology of the normal process and the pathology of the perverted one were obscured and misrepresented by a French physiologist’s experiments on rabbits and dogs. Nothing was done, and at least ninety-five per cent. of the victims of this catastrophe were allowed to die.

“I went outside the experimentalists’ conclusions, went back to the true science of the old pathologist and of the surgeon of 1701, and performed the operation in scores of cases with almost uniform success. My example was immediately followed throughout the world, and during the last five or six years hundreds if not thousands of women’s lives have been saved, whilst for nearly forty years the simple road to this gigantic success was closed by the folly of a vivisector....

“Views such as mine are those of a minority of my professional brethren, and are generally sneered at as those of a 189crank. But my reply to this is that they form the new belief, that of the coming generation, and that not one in fifty of the bulk of my present brethren have ever seriously gone into the question, and probably have never seen a single experiment on a living animal.

“My address as the Surgical Orator of 1890, when the British Medical Association met in this town, was mainly directed to the mischievous system of so-called scientific training, of purely German origin and thoroughly repugnant to our English tastes and our English common-sense.

“It is therefore a satisfactory matter to know that the Council of Mason’s College would have none of it, and that the governing body of the new University College of Nottingham has recently decided similarly. The Medical School of Queen’s College is now united entirely with the Science School of Mason’s College; but we, of Mason’s College, have had the direction of the science teaching of the Medical School for several years, we have had no German scientific methods, and our success has not diminished thereby one atom—on the contrary.”—Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., President of Mason’s Science College, Birmingham (“The Discussion on Vivisection at the Church Congress, October, 1892”).

At the Congress, as above, Professor Horsley made aspersions on Miss Frances Power Cobbe, as to statements concerning Vivisection in her work, “The Nine Circles.” The professor declared some of the reported cruel experiments to have been painless, owing to the victims being under the influence of anæsthetics. In reply to the attack, the following preliminary letter from Miss Cobbe was then published:—

“TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘TIMES.’

“Sir,—Professor Horsley’s criticism on the above work—planned and compiled by my direction—demands from me a careful reply, which I shall endeavour to give as soon as may be possible at this distance from the books whence the impugned passages are derived. I shall be much surprised if the hocus pocus of the sham anæsthetic curare with ineffective applications 190of genuine chloroform do not once more illustrate ‘the curse of vivisectible animals,’ and if the results of the experiments in question, whatever were their worth, would not, in most cases, have been vitiated had real and absolute anæsthesia been produced in the victims. Should a small number of the experiments cited in the ‘Nine Circles’ prove, however, to have been performed on animals in an entirely painless state, I shall, while withdrawing them with apologies from a forthcoming new edition of the book, take care at the same time to call attention to the multitude of other experiments, home and foreign, therein recorded—e.g., baking to death, poisoning, starving, creating all manner of diseases, inoculating in the eyes, dissecting out and irritating the exposed nerves, causing the brain of cats ‘to run like cream,’ etc., about which no room for doubt as to the unassuaged agony of the animal can possibly exist.”

Miss Cobbe concludes by a sharp, but just, criticism on her critic, and with an acute diagnosis of the learned vivisectionist’s own condition:—

“The tone of Dr. Horsley’s remarks against me personally will probably inspire those who know me and the history of my connexion with the anti-vivisection cause with an amused sense of the difficulty wherein the Professor must have found himself when, instead of argument in defence of vivisection, he thus turned to ‘abuse the plaintiffs’ attorney.’ For myself I gladly accept such abuse (or mere bluster) as evidence that the consciences even of eminent vivisectors are, like their victims’ nerves, imperfectly under the influence of the scientific anæsthesia, and remain still sensitive to the heart-pricking charge which I bring against them, of cowardly cruelty to defenceless creatures.

“I am, Sir, yours,

Frances Power Cobbe.

Hengwrt, Dolgelly, Oct. 8th, 1892.”

⁂ A further newspaper correspondence concerning “The Nine Circles,” a work from which some of the foregoing notes on vivisection are copied, has gone on while 191“Woman Free” is passing through the press; the vivisectors saying that certain of the incidents transcribed in “The Nine Circles” are without the announcement that in some cases an anæsthetic had been administered prior to the act of living anatomy, otherwise admittedly true in every detail. The vivisectors lay what stress they can on the omissions; indeed, their principal advocate has made use of a grossness of imputation and a coarseness of invective that augurs ill for any gentleness of treatment or purpose being existent in the organism of such an operator.

Yet, in truth, it is not a matter of surpassing import whether the assertion of the operation (alone) being conducted under an anæsthetic be indubitable, since the after-consequences of pain or incommodity had to be endured by the victim without anæsthetics. What initial chloroforming could ward off the constant after-suffering attendant on the incubation of the disease for the creation of which the “operation” had been performed, a period acknowledgedly often lasting for weeks, and terminated only by death’s mercy? Or what medicament could anæsthetise the impotent yearning—to feed her starving puppy—of a poor mother dog whose mammary glands had been excised, even if the “operation” had been carried out “under chloroform”? Mr. Edward Berdoe, M.R.C.S., reproduces and reprobates the incident with horror in the Times of Oct. 27, 1892:—

“Professor Goltz amputated the breast of the mother of a puppy nursing her young ... who ‘unceasingly licked the living puppy with the same tenderness as an uninjured dog might do.’”

192Most gladly may we turn to the words and ways of worthier seekers after truth. Professor Lawson Tait is reported by the Standard, 28th Oct., 1892, as saying at a meeting the previous day:—

“Vivisection was a survival from mediæval times. It could not be justified by any results that it had produced. In days when they could tell the composition of the atmosphere of Orion by means of the spectroscope, it was a disgrace that men should resort to vivisection, instead of perfecting other and more humane means of research.”

There speaks true science. And, on a later occasion, Mr. Lawson Tait quotes the celebrated anatomist, Sir Charles Bell (who had been falsely claimed as an advocate of vivisection), as saying, “on page 217 of the second volume of his great work on the Nervous System, published in 1839”:—

“... a survey of what has been attempted of late years in physiology will prove that the opening of living animals has done more to perpetuate error than to confirm the just views taken from the study of anatomy and natural motions.... For my own part I cannot believe that Providence should intend that the secrets of nature are to be discovered by means of cruelty, and I am sure that those who are guilty of protracted cruelties do not possess minds capable of appreciating the laws of nature.”—(The Times, Nov. 8th, 1892, p. 3.)

The views of Charles Bell and Lawson Tait are in striking and encouraging coincidence with verses LIII., LIV., and LV.

To women peculiarly it belongs to oppose the doctrines and methods of vivisectionists, for to the practitioners of that school were due the arguments or assumptions which 193sufficed to introduce for a while into our country the vile system of according a licence to male dissoluteness and female subjection—under a pretext of public morality and “scientific” sanction—known on the continent as the “police des mœurs,” and in sundry Naval and Military stations of England and Ireland as the “Contagious Diseases Acts.”

LV.

8.—“... from Love’s might alone all thoughts of Wisdom grow.”

“Hast thou considered how the beginning of all thought worthy the name is love; and the wise head never yet was, without first the generous heart?”—Carlyle (“French Revolution,” Vol. III., p. 375).

LVI.

5.—“With woman honoured, rises man to height.”

“If a Hindoo principality is strongly, vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without oppression, if cultivation is extended, and the people prosperous, in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman’s rule. This fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a long official knowledge of Hindoo Governments.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 100 note).

6.—“With her degraded, sinks again in night.”

“And you who have departed from the common tradition, how have you fared in the race of life? Are your men as 194brave and fearlessly truthful, are your women as courageous and honest as in the old days of ‘the maiden’s choice’? Are the little worn-out child-wives of to-day likely to have descendants like those of the damsels of your ancient epics? Where are the deeds of high emprise, of daring valour, and of patient persistence of the youths who were fired by the pure love of a woman? Ah! gentlemen, with love life departs; there is no vitality in married life without affection, and when love, the great incentive to action, disappears from the family, leaving dry the streams of affection which should flow between the children and parents, what must come of the race?”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos”).

Id.... “From all we know of the laws of life and its development it would appear one of the foolishest things on earth for men to fancy that they can debase the intellect lobes of women, and at the same time exalt their own. No breeder of cattle or horses would think of debasing the qualities, in the females, which he would desire to possess in the males.

“No race in the future can either rule the world or even continue in existence without improving the intellect of that race, and this certainly cannot be done by depauperising the intellects of more than half of the progenitors of that race.”—Dr. E. Bonavia (“Woman’s Frontal Lobes”).

8.—“.... Earth’s advancing queen.”

“Will man den ganzen Menschen studiren, so darf man nur auf das weibliche Geschlecht seine Augen richten: denn wo die Kraft schwacher ist, da ist das Werkzeug um 195so künstlicher. Daher hat die Natur in das weibliche Geschlecht eine natürliche Anlage zur Kunst gelegt. Der Mann ist geschaffen, ueber die Natur zu gebieten, das Weib aber, den Mann zu regieren. Zum Ersten gehört viel Kraft, zum Andern viel Geschicklichkeit.”—Immanuel Kant.

LVII.

1.—“... in jealousy ...”

The male conceit and jealousy of sex, existent among the majority of meaner men, has been perceived and censured or satirised by higher masculine minds both in ancient and modern literature. To take a few scattered instances from the latter, Shakespeare says:—

“... however we do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and infirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won

Than women’s are.”

—(“Twelfth Night,” Act II., Sc. 4.)

Goethe says pungently (in “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”): “People ridicule learned women and dislike even women who are well informed, probably because it is considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame.”

As our own plain-spoken Sydney Smith has said, in his essay on Female Education:—“It is natural that men who are ignorant themselves, should view, with some degree of jealousy and alarm, any proposal for improving the education of women.”

A ludicrously pitiful modern-day instance of the jealous ignorance or ignorant jealousy to which Goethe and Sydney 196Smith make reference, is afforded by a seriously-written leading article in No. 545 of the Christian Commonwealth, a London weekly newspaper, under date of 24th March, 1892:—

“The Woman question will not down. She is asserting herself in every direction, and generally with considerable force. In America she is positively alarming the lords of creation by her rapid progress in educational matters. She is actually outrunning the men in the race for intellectual attainments. And this fact is becoming so evident, and so prominent, that a new problem is being evolved from it. This is, how are the finely educated young women of America to find congenial husbands? It is assumed by some writers that already there is a great disparity between the culture of the young men and young women, and that every year the chasm between them is becoming deeper and wider. This is a truly lamentable state of things, but the woman movement in this country is likely to take a more practical course. The agitation of the question of Woman Suffrage may bring about a reaction against her excessive culture. If woman is permitted to enter the cesspool of politics, it is probable she will not be very long distressed with an overplus of those qualities which are just now endangering her conjugal felicity in the United States....”

It is refreshing and consolatory to revert from such verbiage to what Sir Humphrey Davy said (“Lectures, 1810 and 1811”): “It has been too much the custom to endeavour to attach ridicule to the literary and scientific acquisitions of women. Let them make it disgraceful for men to be ignorant, and ignorance will perish.”

To Shakespeare and Goethe may be added the corroboration of French intellect:—

“N’est-il pas évident que Molière, dans ses Femmes Savantes n’a pas attaqué l’instruction, l’étude, mais le pédantisme, comme, dans son Tartuffe, il avait attaqué 197non la vraie dévotion, mais l’hypocrisie? N’est-ce pas Molière lui-même qui a écrit ce beau vers: “Et je veux qu’une femme ait des clartés de tout?”—Monseigneur Dupanloup, Evêque d’Orléans (“Femmes Savantes et Femmes Studieuses,” 1868, p. 8).

“C’est à Condorcet et non pas à Jean Jacques, comme on le croit généralement, qu’appartient l’initiative des réformes proposées dans l’éducation et la condition des femmes.”—Daniel Stern (“Hist. de la Révolution de 1848,” Vol. II, p. 185).

“Quand la loi française”—(shall we not say also every other?)—“déclare la femme inférieure à l’homme ce n’est jamais pour libérer la femme d’un devoir vis-à-vis de l’homme ou de la société, c’est pour armer l’homme ou la société d’un droit de plus contre elle. Il n’est jamais venu à l’idée de la loi de tenir compte de la faiblesse de la femme dans les différents délits qu’elle peut commettre; au contraire, la loi en abuse.”—A. Dumas fils (“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” etc., p. 204).

Mill says:—“There is nothing which men so easily learn as this self-worship; all privileged persons, and all privileged classes have had it.” And he also speaks of a time—“when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them.”—(“Subjection of Women,” pp. 76, 77).

We have seen (Note XLV., 5) how Professor Huxley postulates scientific training equally for girls and boys; he has also said:—“Emancipate girls. Recognise the fact that they share the senses, perceptions, feelings, reasoning powers, emotions of boys, and that the mind of the average 198girl is less different from that of the average boy, than the mind of one boy is from that of another; so that whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys, justifies its application to girls as well.”—(“Emancipation, Black and White.”)

Balzac asserted: “A woman who has received a masculine education possesses the most brilliant and fertile qualities, with which to secure the happiness of her husband and herself.”—(“Physiologie du Mariage,” Méditation XI.).

But the instances are innumerable where the intellect of higher men expressly or unconsciously rebukes the jealous sexual conceit of their less intelligent brethren. Dr. Bonavia says, very tersely:—“The fact is, many men don’t like the idea of being surpassed or even equalled by women. They stupidly feel their dignity wounded. This jealousy, however, is not only extremely contemptible and unjust, but disastrous to the true interests of the race, for men have mothers as well as women, and imbecility—the result of atrophied frontal lobes—is just as likely to be transmitted to the one sex as to the other, as far as we yet know. Just see the injustice of men’s jealousy in matters of intellect. Only recently the talent of Miss Ormerod—an entomologist who can hold her own anywhere on earth—was kept under by the Royal Agricultural Society. She did the entomological work, and made the discoveries, while they took the credit. In their reports they did not even mention her name in connection with her own work!—A more contemptible proceeding, it would appear, has never been brought to light, in the struggle of the sexes, if that 199case has been correctly reported.”—(“Woman’s Frontal Lobes.”)

Bebel treats this jealousy with a fine irony in his exposition of “the motives which induce most medical professors, and indeed the professors of every faculty, to oppose women students:”—“They regard the admission of women as synonymous with the degradation of science (!) which could not but lose its prestige in the eyes of the enlightened (!) multitude if it appeared that the female brain was capable of grasping problems which had hitherto only been revealed to the elect of the opposite sex.”—(Op. cit., p. 132.)

Had Bebel recorded masculine mercenary considerations, rather than sham misgivings as to the interests of science, his sarcasm would have been very grim truth. Indeed, what is sometimes called the “loaves and fishes” argument is at the root of most of this masculine jealousy which cloaks itself under a pretension of tender consideration for woman’s delicacy. To cite Bebel again: “Another objection is that it is unseemly to admit women to medical lectures, to operations, and deliveries, side by side with male students. If men see nothing indecent in studying and examining female patients in the presence of nurses and other female patients, it is difficult to understand why it should become so through the presence of female students.”—(Op. cit., p. 132.) And as to the actual fitness of women for exercising the profession of medicine or surgery:—

“‘Women always improve when the men begin to show signs of failing,’ were the words of a distinguished physician 200and surgeon, who had seen years of service on a remote wintry station of the army. ‘I have had fellows brought to me to have the leg amputated—perhaps both—close to the body, and never anywhere in Paris, London, or New York, saw I better surgeon’s assistants than some of our women made, especially the Sisters of Charity, of whom we had a few at the post, for three or four years. Heads as clear as a silver bell; hands steady and unshrinking as a granite rock, yet with a touch as light as a spring leaf; foot quick and indefatigable, whether the time was noonday or midnight; memory perfect; tenderness for the sufferer unfailing. Talk about love, courage, fortitude, and endurance in your sex! I tell you,’ he added, with a needless affirmation at this point, ‘they seem to be nothing else, when these are most wanted, and the man who doubts them is an ass.’”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 157). See also Note XXIX., 8.

Id. ... Here may fittingly follow the report of a trained masculine judgment as to woman’s ability in yet a further profession—that of the law:—

At the recent opening of the Southern California College of Law, at Los Angeles, John W. Mitchell, the president, in his lecture upon “The Study of the Law,” spoke of the utility of women studying law, in the following language:—

“This part of this discourse it is believed would be radically incomplete without calling attention to one other and particular class of persons who need an insight into the rudiments of law—which class, it seems, has also been neglected by those occupying a like position to my own—I mean the women. He is, indeed, blind to the signs of the times who does not recognise the expanding field of women’s work, and their increased influence in the professions as well as in the fine arts. 201That women are entering the lists with men, in behalf of themselves and womankind, is well; for they must make up their minds to take up the task of urging the reforms they need, and must solve the woman problem in all its bearings. Women are doing this. They are becoming competitors with men in the pursuits of life, it is true; but it is as much from necessity as choice. But it is not only the women who have to labour and earn their own living who need legal knowledge to aid them. It is more needful to the woman of property, be her possessions but an humble home or a colossal fortune; whether she be married or single. Women want this experience to make them cautious of jeopardising their rights, and less confiding in business matters. The courts are full of cases showing how women have been wrongly stripped of their belongings. And, perhaps, if one woman had known the legal effect of some of her acts, one of the largest fortunes ever amassed in this State of Crœsus-like wealth would not have been carried to distant States, and there scandalously distributed amongst scheming adventurers and lawyers, making a little Massachusetts county-seat the theatre of one of the most remarkable contests for a fortune in the whole annals of probate court law.

“As to the professions: women were for a long time barred from them, but now the barriers to all of them have been removed, and there is not a profession in which women are not distinguished. They have graduated in the sciences from most universities with the highest honours, and have stood the same tests as the men. The law was about the last to admit them within its precincts, and there they are meeting with an unexpected measure of success. Not only in this, but in other countries, there are successful women practitioners. And in France, where the preparatory course is most arduous, and the term of study longest, a woman recently took the highest rank over 500 men in her graduating examinations, and during the whole six years of class study she only lost one day from her work—an example that is commended to you students. Undoubtedly, the weight of the argument is in favour of women studying law.”—(Women’s Journal, Boston, U.S., 6th February, 1892.)

Id.... Even the vaunted politeness and gallantry of the Frenchman is not proof against the far more deeply-bedded 202masculine jealousy. M. de Blowitz, the erudite correspondent at Paris of the Times, reports that—

“The law students yesterday hooted down Mdlle. Jeanne Chauvin, 28 years of age, who was to have argued a thesis for a legal degree. She had chosen as her theme, ‘The Professions accessible to Women and the Historical Evolution of the Economic Position of Woman in Society.’ The uproar was such that the examiner postponed the ceremony sine die. Mdlle. Chauvin is the first Frenchwoman who has sought a legal degree, but two years ago a Roumanian lady went through the ordeal without obstruction.”—(The Times, July 4, 1892.)

To revert to the “loaves and fishes” argument, an incident now to be given will show that medicine and the law are not the only professions in which the objections to the equal status of the sexes are largely prompted by a “jalousie de métier” of a selfish and mercenary character:—

“The following letters have been received at Auckland from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in relation to the memorial lately sent from New Zealand in favour of the opening of degrees to women:—

“‘Dear Professor Aldis,

“‘Your very interesting memorial reached me yesterday. I still await the explanatory letter and analysis. After receiving I will write again.

“‘Yours etc.,

John Peile,

Vice-Chancellor.

Christ’s College Lodge,

‘Cambridge, Nov. 2nd, 1891.’

“‘My Dear Professor Aldis,

“‘The petition of the memorial received by me from Miss Lilian Edger and yourself, respecting degrees for women at the University of Cambridge, and the analysis of the signatures 203to that memorial, have been printed by me in the University Reporter, the official organ of communication of any kind of business to the members of the Senate. The memorial itself will be preserved in the Registry of the University. Immediate action on this question by the Council of the Senate—the body, with which, as you are aware, all legislation in the University must begin—is not probable. The question was raised about three years ago; and it became at once plain that, if persevered in, it would produce a very serious division in the ranks of those members of the University who had all shown themselves, in the past, friends to the highest education of women. Many of those who had earnestly supported the admission of women to Tripos examinations, would not support their admission to the B.A. degree. Into their—mostly practical—reasons I cannot fully enter: One was the belief that admission to B.A. must lead, in the end (in spite of any provisions which might be introduced), to admission to M.A., and consequently to a share in the management of the University; it was also apprehended that difficulties would arise in the several colleges with respect to fellowships, etc. I do not mention these difficulties as insuperable. But they are felt by so many that there is, I am persuaded, no prospect of successful action in this matter at the present time. I shall, therefore, not myself propose anything in the Council, nor so far has any other of the friends of women’s education, of whom there are many on the Council, given notice of any motion. At any future time, when such a motion is made, your most influential memorial will certainly have its due weight with the members of the Council, and if they decide to take action, I hope also, with members of the Senate.

“‘I am, etc.,

John Peile,

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

Christ’s College Lodge,

Cambridge, Nov. 20th, 1891.’”

—(New Zealand Herald, 5th Jan., 1892.)

6.—“... potency ...”

“The Brain is different from all other organs of the body. It is often a mass of structural potentialities rather than of 204fully-developed nerve tissues. Some of its elements, viz., those concerned with best-established instinctive operations, naturally go on to their full development without the aid of extrinsic stimuli; others, however, and large tracts of these, seem to progress to such developments only under the influence of suitable stimuli. Hence natural aptitudes and potencies of the most subtle order may never be manifested by multitudes of persons, for want of the proper stimuli and practice capable of perfecting the development and functional activity of those regions of the brain whose action is inseparably related to the mental phenomena in question.”—Dr. H. C. Bastian (“The Brain as an Organ of Mind,” p. 374).

LVIII.

1.—“Woman’s own soul must seek and find ...”

On women of medical education especially is the duty incumbent to investigate the world of biological experience in woman. They may not sit quietly down and assume that in learning all that man has to teach, they rest his equals, and that the last word has been said on the matter. They have a field of exploration, with opportunities, with implements, and with capacities, which man cannot have. His research on such a question as the recognisedly most vital one of human embryology with all its issues, can get but rare and uncertain light from accidental occasions, and is, moreover, simply as it were a dead anatomising; nor can he by any means reach the psychic or introspective phase of enquiry; but woman has the live subject, body and soul, in 205her own organism, to study at her leisure. Does she not yet see how to grasp such further living knowledge? But that is the very quest here indicated. The askidian also had no strength of vision, yet we can now tell and test the light and the components of distant spheres.

There are, undoubtedly, what may be termed intelligent operations carried on in the body unconsciously to oneself, or at any rate beyond the present ken of one’s actively perceptive and volitional faculties. Observation and recognition of these is to be striven for, and even guidance or command of them may be ours in a worthy future. The Times of 27th January, 1892, reported a lecture at the Royal Institution on the previous day by Professor Victor Horsley, in the course of which the lecturer—

“... pointed out the pineal gland, which Descartes thought to be the seat of the soul, but which was now known to be an invertebrate eye. He also explained the functions of certain small masses of grey matter, which are two, viz.—sight and equilibration. The optic nerve was situated close to the crura, and equilibration was subserved by the cerebellum. After referring to the basal ganglia, Professor Horsley admitted that as science advanced we seem to know less and less about the specific functions of the various masses of grey matter, and less definite views than formerly prevailed were now held with respect to the local source of what are termed voluntary impulses, and that of sensations.... We were still in ignorance as to the functions of the optic thalamus, and of the corpus striatum. Those of the cortex had to some extent been ascertained. They might be divided into three classes, viz.—movement, sensation, and what was termed mental phenomena. But we were still in the dark as to those portions of the brain which subserved intellectual operations, memory, and emotional impulses. A like ignorance prevailed with respect to the basal ganglia.”

206What as yet unrecognised inward eyes watch over the embryo life?

3.—“... counsel helpful ...”

Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham says:—“In this day the most needed science to humankind is that which will commend women to confidence in themselves and their sex as the leading force of the coming Era—the Era of spiritual rule and movement; in which, through them, the race is destined to rise to a more exalted position than ever before it has held, and for the first time to form its dominant ties of relationship to that world of purer action and diviner motion, which lies above the material one of intellectual struggle and selfish purpose wherein man has held and exercised his long sovereignty.”—(“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. I., p. 311).

5.—“... philosophic lore ...”

“The farther our knowledge advances, the greater will be the need of rising to transcendental views of the physical world.... If the imagination had been more cultivated, if there had been a closer union between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of science, natural philosophy would have made greater progress because natural philosophers would have taken a higher and more successful aim, and would have enlisted on their side a wider range of human sympathies.”—Buckle (“Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge”).

Id. “... chirurgic lore ...”

“The Lady Dufferin fund had already been the means of 207opening a school of medicine for Indian women, who would consequently devote themselves to the study of anatomy. Anatomy and Asiatic women. That was the most extraordinary association of ideas one could ever have imagined.”—Professor Vambéry (Lecture to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Edinburgh, 20th May, 1891). Reported in the Times of following day.

8.—“Regent of Nature’s will, ...”

“Woman will grow into fitness for the sublime work which nature has given her to do, and man through her help and persuasion will spontaneously assume the relation of a co-operator in it. Finding that nature intends his highest good and that of his species, through the emancipation and development of woman into the fulness of her powers, he will gratefully seek his own profit and happiness in harmonising himself with this method; he will honour it as nature’s method, and woman as its chief executor; and will joyfully find that not only individuals, families, and communities, but nations, have been wisely dependent on her, in their more advanced conditions, for the good which can come only from the most perfect, artistic, and spiritual being who inhabits our earth.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 423).

LIX.

1.—“Each sequent life shall feel her finer care.”

“The one thing constant, the one peak that rises above all clouds, the one window in which the light for ever 208burns, the one star that darkness cannot quench, is woman’s love. This one fact justifies the existence and the perpetuation of the human race. Again I say that women are better than men; their hearts are more unreservedly given; in the web of their lives sorrow is inextricably woven with the greatest joys; self-sacrifice is a part of their nature, and at the behest of love and maternity they walk willingly and joyously down to the very gates of death. Is there nothing in this to excite the admiration, the adoration, of a modern reformer? Are the monk and nun superior to the father and mother?”—Robert Ingersoll (North American Review, Sept., 1890).

2.—“Each heir of life a wealthier bounty share;”

Poets and physiologists agree in these prognostications. The keen observer, Bastian, in his treatise on archebiosis, willingly calls to his support an equally conscientious ally, in the following passage:—

“We must battle on along the path of knowledge and of duty, trusting in that natural progress towards a far distant future for the human race, such as its past history may warrant us in anticipating. For, as Mr. Wallace points out, those natural influences which have hitherto promoted man’s progress ‘still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man’s higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature and to the exigencies of the social state,’ so that ‘his mental constitution may continue to advance and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single, nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior 209to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.’”—Dr. H. Charlton Bastian (“The Beginnings of Life,” Vol. II., p. 633).

3.—“Those lives allied in equal union chaste.”

“The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity.”

—Walt Whitman (“Children of Adam”).

4.—“A sweeter purpose, purer rapture, taste;”

“A wife is no longer the husband’s property; and, according to modern ideas, marriage is, or should be, a contract on the footing of perfect equality between the sexes. The history of human marriage is the history of a relation in which women have been gradually triumphing over the passions, the prejudices, and the selfish interests of men.”—Edward Westermarck (Concluding words of “The History of Human Marriage”).

7.—“The only rivalry ...”

“When woman finds her proper place in legislation, it will be found ultimately that it will be not as man’s rival, but his helpmate.”—Mabel Collins (“On Woman’s Relation to the State”).

8.—“How for their lineage fair still larger fate to find.”

“Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, had the idea of making public principle and utility predominate over private interests and affections; and on that idea he ordained that children were not to be the property of their parents, but 210of the State, which was to direct their education, and determine their modes of life. A better idea with the legislators of the future—the number of whom will be equal with that of all wholesomely-developed men and women upon the earth—will be to take fullest advantage of all natural instincts. The parents, their hearts ever yearning with love for their offspring, and the community, careful of its individual members, co-operating in placing the children under all good influences towards that development, which, being the best for their individual lives, will also coincide with what is best for the general welfare. For this end, the experience of the past, and the higher wisdom of their own times, will far better qualify them to judge of fitting means and methods than we can now either surmise or suggest.”—David Maxwell (“Stepping-stones to Socialism,” p. 15).

LX.

1.—“Their task ineffable yields wondrous gain.”

“... I rest not from my great task;

To open the eternal worlds! To open the immortal eyes

Of man inwards; into the worlds of thought: into eternity

Ever expanding the human imagination.”

—William Blake (“Jerusalem”).

2.—“Their energies celestial force attain.”

“Les écrivains du dix-huitième siècle ont sans doute rendu d’immenses services aux Sociétés; mais leur philosophie basée sur le sensualisme, n’est pas allée plus loin que 211l’épiderme humain. Ils n’ont considéré que l’univers extérieur, et, sous ce rapport seulement, ils ont retardé, pour quelque temps, le développement morale de l’homme.... L’étude des mystères de la pensée, la découverte des organes de l’AME humaine, la géométrie de ses forces, les phénomènes de sa puissance, l’appréciation de la faculté qu’elle nous semble posséder de se mouvoir indépendamment du corps, de se transporter où elle veut et de voir sans le secours des organes corporels, enfin les lois de sa dynamique et celles de son influence physique, constitueront la glorieuse part du siècle suivant dans le trésor des sciences humaines. Et nous ne sommes occupés peut être, en ce moment, qu’à extraire les blocs énormes qui serviront plus tard à quelque puissant génie pour bâtir quelque glorieux édifice.”—Balzac (“Physiologie du Mariage,” Méditation XXVI.).

3, 4.—“Their intermingled souls, with passion dight,

In aspiration soar past earthly height.”

“As yet we are in the infancy of our knowledge. What we have done is but a speck compared to what remains to be done. For what is there that we really know? We are too apt to speak as if we had penetrated into the sanctuary of truth and raised the veil of the goddess, when, in fact, we are still standing, coward-like, trembling before the vestibule, and not daring, from very fear, to cross the threshold of the temple. The highest of our so-called laws of nature are as yet purely empirical.

“... They who discourse to you of the laws of nature as if those laws were binding upon nature, or as if they 212formed a part of nature, deceive both you and themselves. The (so-called) laws of nature have their sole seat, origin, and function in the human mind. They are simply the conditions under which the regularity of nature is recognised. They explain the external world, but they reside in the internal. As yet we know scarcely anything of the laws of mind, and, therefore, we scarcely know anything of the laws of nature. We talk of the law of gravitation, and yet we know not what gravitation is; we talk of the conservation of force and distribution of forces, and we know not what forces are; we talk with complacent ignorance of the atomic arrangements of matter, and we neither know what atoms are nor what matter is; we do not even know if matter, in the ordinary sense of the word, can be said to exist; we have as yet only broken the first ground, we have but touched the crust and surface of things. Before us and around us there is an immense and untrodden field, whose limits the eye vainly strives to define; so completely are they lost in the dim and shadowy outline of the future. In that field, which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe that the imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding. Our poetry will have to reinforce our logic, and we must feel as much as we argue. Let us then hope, that the imaginative and emotional minds of one sex will continue to accelerate the great progress, by acting upon and improving the colder and harder minds of the other sex.”—Buckle (“Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge”).

6.—“... the vision to retain,”

213As with Wordsworth’s nature-nurtured maiden:—

“... beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face ...

And vital feelings of delight

Shall rear her form to stately height ...

The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her; for her the willow bend,

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the storm

Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form

By silent sympathy.”

—(“Poems of the Imagination”).

Id.... “My hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower. There is so much for us yet to come, so much to be gathered, and enjoyed. Not for you or me, now, but for our race, who will ultimately use this magical secret for their happiness. Earth holds secrets enough to give them the life of the fabled Immortals. My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man’s existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.... He is indeed despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.”—R. Jefferies (“The Pageant of Summer”).

2147, 8.—“... mould their dreams of love, with conscious skill

To human living types ...”

“Her Brain enlabyrinths the whole heaven of her bosom and loins

To put in act what her Heart wills.”

—William Blake (“Jerusalem”).

“These states belong so purely to the inner nature; are so deeply hidden beneath the strata of what we call the inner life, even, that only women, and of these, only such as have become self-acquainted, through seeing the depths within the depths of their own consciousness, can fully comprehend all that is meant in the words a ‘Purposed Maternity.’ I use them in their highest sense, meaning not the mere purpose of satisfying the maternal instincts, which the quadruped feels and acts from, as well as the human being, but the intelligent, artistic purpose (to which the maternal instinct is a fundamental motive), to act in harmony with Nature in producing the most perfect being which the powers and resources employed, can bring forth.... It is probable that we shall, ere long, arrive at truer views of maternity everywhere; and when we do, I think it will be seen that the office has a sacredness in Nature’s eyes above all other offices, and that she reserves for it the finest of her vital forces, powers, susceptibilities, and means of every sort.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 385; Vol. I., p. 93).