NOTES, &c.

I.

2.—“Science calm moves ...”

“Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”—George Eliot (“Middlemarch,” Chap. LXXIII.)

3.—“Research and reason ...”

As indicated by Professor Oliver T. Lodge, “It is but a platitude to say that our clear and conscious aim should always be truth, and that no lower or meaner standard should ever be allowed to obtrude itself before us. Our ancestors fought hard and suffered much for the privilege of free and open inquiry, for the right of conducting investigation untrammelled by prejudice and foregone conclusions, and they were ready to examine into any phenomenon which presented itself.... Fear of avowing interest or of examining into unorthodox facts is, I venture to say, not in accordance with the highest traditions of the scientific attitude.”—(Address as President of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association, 1891.)

36See also the words of Richard Jefferies:—“Research proceeds upon the same old lines and runs in the ancient grooves.... But there should be no limit placed on the mind.... Most injurious of all is the continuous circling on the same path, and it is from this that I wish to free my mind.”—(“The Story of My Heart,” Chap. X.)

5.—“... part revealed.”

“We are still the early settlers in a beautiful world, whose capabilities, imperfectly known as yet, wait until higher developments of man can understand them fully, and apply the result to the general good.”—Professor T. Rupert Jones (Address as President of the Geological Section of the British Association, 1891).

II.

3.—“... keener conscience ...”

“C’est l’incarnation de l’idée qui se dresse tout à coup en face des vieilles traditions obstinées et insuffisantes et elle vient ... poser sa revendication personelle et nécessaire contre les lois jadis excellentes, mais qui, les mœurs s’étant modifiées, apparaissent subitement comme des injustices et des barbaries.”—A. Dumas fils (“Les Femmes qui Tuent et les Femmes qui Votent,” p. 25).

IV.

7.—“... monitor’s still voice.”—Conf. Wordsworth;

“Taught both by what she” (Nature) “shows, and what conceals,

37Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

(“Hart-Leap Well.”)

VI.

1.—“... prehistoric hour.”

“The preface of general history must be compiled from the materials presented by barbarism. Happily, if we may say so, these materials are abundant. So unequally has the species been developed, that almost every conceivable phase of progress may be studied, as somewhere observed and recorded. And thus the philosopher, fenced from mistake as to the order of development, by the inter-connection of the stages and their shadings into one another by gentle gradations, may draw a clear and decided outline of the course of human progress in times long antecedent to those to which even philology can make reference.”—M’Lennan (“Primitive Marriage,” p. 9)....

Id.... “I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to establish that, in primitive societies, woman, being held in very low esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices there is nothing which approaches even distantly to marriage, and we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes marriages.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. VI.).

382.—“... woman thrall ...”

“Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed.”—August Bebel (“Woman,” Chap. I.).

Id.... “From the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by man, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Woman,” Chap. I.).

Id.... “In every country, and in every time, woman, organically weaker than man, has been more or less enslaved by him.”—Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XI.).

Id....

“It raised up the humble and fallen, gave spirit and strength to the poor,

And is freeing from slavery Woman, the slave of all ages gone by.”

—C. G. Leland (“The Return of the Gods”).

3.—“... heinous skill.”

“It is pitiful to reflect that man’s vaunted superiority over the brute, the greater activity of his brain, and the subtler cunning of his hand, have for so long lent themselves to the oppression that has resulted in such pernicious consequences, and in the still existent slavery, social and physical, of the female of his own species.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).

8.—“... soulless gloom.”

Compare the following picture of the somewhat parallel condition of a lower race at the present time:—

39“Natives may well call the monkey sire Maharaja, for he is the very type and incarnation of savage and sensual despotism. They are right, too, in making their Hanuman red, for the old male’s face is of the dusky red you see in some elderly, overfed human faces. Like human Maharajas, they have their tragedies and mayhap their romances. One morning there came a monkey chieftain, weak and limping, having evidently been worsted in a severe fight with another of his own kind. One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes bore terrible traces of battle, and he hirpled slowly along with a pathetic air of suffering, supporting himself on the shoulder of a female, a wife, the only member of his clan who had remained faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them bread and raisins, and the wounded warrior carefully stowed the greater part away in his cheek pouch. The faithful wife, seeing her opportunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound hand, and, opening his mouth, she deftly scooped out the store of raisins. Then she sat and ate them very calmly at a safe distance, while he mowed and chattered in impotent rage. He knew that without her help he could not reach home, and was fain to wait with what patience he might till the raisins were finished. It was a sad sight, but, like more sad sights, touched with the light of comedy. This was probably her first chance of disobedience or of self-assertion in her whole life, and I am afraid she thoroughly enjoyed it. Then she led him away.”—J. Lockwood Kipling (“Beast and Man in India”).

VII.

1.—“... Evolution ...”

“We now know that Nature, as an anthropomorphic being, does not exist; that the great forces called natural are unconscious; that their blind action results, however, in the world of life, in a choice, a selection, a progressive evolution, or, to sum up, in the survival of the individuals best adapted to the conditions of their existence.”—Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. I., Part II.).

40Id.... “Robert Chambers’s common-sense view of evolution as a process of continued growing.”—Professor Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” p. 302).

3.—“By Art ...”

“Other implements of Palæolithic age are formed of bone and horn. Among these are harpoon-heads, barbed on one or both sides, awls, pins, and needles with well-formed eyes. But by far the most noteworthy objects of this class are the fragments of bone, horn, ivory, and stone, which exhibit outlined and even shaded sketches of various animals. These engravings have been made with a sharp-pointed implement, and are often wonderfully characteristic representations of the creatures they pourtray. The figures are sometimes single, in other cases they are drawn in groups. We find representations of a fish, a seal, an ibex, the red-deer, the great Irish elk or deer, the bison, the horse, the cave-bear, the reindeer, and the mammoth or woolly elephant. Besides engravings, we meet also with sculptures.... It is impossible to say to what use all these objects were put. Some of them may have been handles for knives, while others are mere fragments, and only vague guesses can be made as to the nature of the original implements. It is highly probable, however, that many of these works of art may have been designed simply as such, for the pleasure and amusement of the draughtsman and his fellows.”—James Geikie (“Prehistoric Europe,” Chap. II.).

Id.... The culture or appreciation of Art is of 41itself evidence of a higher nature in man; “a soul, a psyche, a something which aspires,” as Richard Jefferies calls it. For though the professional pursuit of Art may be occasionally not unmingled with mercenary motives, or with the pourtrayal of incentives to lower desire, yet the ultimate appeal of every truly beautiful picture or object of Art is, at any rate, not to man’s mercenary or meaner nature. As Jefferies again says, “The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. The soul is the higher even by gazing on beauty.”—(“The Story of My Heart,” Chap. VII.)

7.—“... the soul ...”

“The mind of man is infinite. Beyond this, man has a soul. I do not use this word in the common-sense which circumstances have given to it. I use it as the only term to express that inner consciousness which aspires.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” Chap. IX.).

8.—“... from lower flush of lust.”

“The fact to be insisted upon is this, that the vague sexual attraction of the lowest organisms has been evolved into a definite reproductive impulse, into a desire often predominating over even that of self-preservation; that this, again, enhanced by more and more subtle additions, passes by a gentle gradient into the love of the highest animals, and of the average human individual.”—Geddes and Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).

VIII.

5, 6.—“The voice erst roused by hunger or by rage,

Now tells the nobler passions of the age.”

42“The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when, with his varied tones and cadences, he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions during their mutual courtship and rivalry.”—Darwin (“The Descent of Man,” Chap. XIX.).

7.—“... with love’s language is uplifted love.”

Language is thought, we are told; so also is love. And thus the reciprocal and cumulative action of love, thought, and language stands a corollary to Max Müller’s words:—“Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.”—(“Science of Language,” Lect. IX.)

Id.... “Even the rude Australian girl (aborigine) sings in a strain of romantic affliction:

‘I shall never see my darling again.’”

—Westermarck (“History of Human Marriage,” p. 503).

Id.... “And again, another benefit accrues to the race from marriages of affection. Do not your ancient epics which sing of love sing also of noble deeds and acts of heroism on the part both of men and women, actuated by a pure affection for each other? Alike in your dramas and in those of Shakespeare, and of all great writers, love is the great motive power which impels to deeds of prowess, the spring of noble actions, of unselfish devotion, of words and thoughts which have enriched all later generations, the one 43sentiment which elevates marriage amongst mankind to something infinitely higher and purer than the gratification of a mere animal instinct.”—Dr. Edith Pechey Phipson (Address to the Hindoos of Bombay on Child Marriage, 1891, p. 14).

8.—“... selfless thought.”

“Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.”

—Tennyson (“Locksley Hall”).

IX.

7.—“... Neglecting none ...”

“We are entering into an order of things in which justice will be the primary virtue, grounded on equal, but also on sympathetic association; having its roots no longer in the instinct of equals for self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 80).

X.

4.—“... clogged ... man’s power ...”

“He has reaped the usual reward of selfishness, the gratification of immediate low desires has frustrated the future attainment of higher aspirations.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to Hindoos).

445, 6.—“Egypt or Greece in vain sought heavenly light,

While woman’s soul was held from equal flight.”

In Egypt “the art (of literature) was practised only by the priests, as the painted history plainly declares.... No female is depicted in the act of reading.... The Greek world was composed of municipal aristocracies, societies of gentlemen living in towns, with their farms in the neighbourhood, and having all their work done for them by slaves. They themselves had nothing to do but to cultivate their bodies by exercise in the gymnasium, and their minds by conversation in the market-place. They lived out of doors, whilst their wives remained shut up at home. In Greece a lady could only enter society by adopting a mode of life which in England usually facilitates her exit.”—Winwood Reade (“The Martyrdom of Man,” pp. 35, 71).

8.—“... subjugated wife ...”

At Athens “the free citizen women lived in strict and almost Oriental recluseness, as well after being married as when single. Everything which concerned their lives, their happiness, or their rights, was determined or managed for them by their male relatives; and they seem to have been destitute of all mental culture and accomplishments.”—Grote (“History of Greece,” Vol. VI., p. 133).

XI.

1.—“Marriage which might have been a mateship sweet.”

“In vain Plato urged that young men and women should 45be more frequently permitted to meet one another, so that there should be less enmity and indifference in the married life.” (“Nomoi,” Book VI.)—Westermarck (“History of Human Marriage,” p. 361).

2.—“... equal souls ...”

“The feeling which makes husband and wife true companions for better and worse, can grow up only in societies where the altruistic sentiments of man are strong enough to make him recognise woman as his equal, and where she is not shut up as an exotic plant in a greenhouse, but is allowed to associate freely with men. In this direction European civilisation has been advancing for centuries.”—Westermarck (loc. cit.). (See also Note XIX., 6.)

7, 8.—“Her only hope of thought or learning wide,

Some freer lot to seek than yoke forlorn of bride.”

In Greece “the modest women were confined to their own apartments, and were visited only by their husbands and nearest relations.... The courtesans of Athens, by living in public, and conversing freely with all ranks of people, upon all manner of subjects, acquired, by degrees, a knowledge of history, of philosophy, of policy, and a taste in the whole circle of the arts. Their ideas were more extensive and various, and their conversation was more sprightly and entertaining than anything that was to be found among the virtuous part of the sex. Hence their houses became the schools of elegance; that of Aspasia was the resort of Socrates and Pericles, and, as Greece was governed by eloquent men, over whom the courtesans had an influence, 46the latter also influenced public affairs.”—Alexander Walker (“Woman, as to Mind,” &c., p. 334).

XII.

3.—“... craving mental food ...”

That the quest of knowledge and intellectual power was literally the incentive to many a woman who accepted the life of hetaira is indisputable. Westermarck says:—“It seems to me much more reasonable to suppose that if, in Athens and India, courtesans were respected and sought after by the principal men, it was because they were the only educated women.”—(“History of Marriage,” p. 81.)

And Letourneau remarks:—“Religious prostitution, which was widely spread in Greek antiquity, has been also found in India, where every temple of renown had its bayadères, the only women in India to whom, until quite recently, any instruction was given.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. III.)

5, 6.—“Conceding that, might lead a learned life—

A license vetoed to the legal wife.”

“Hetairai, famous at once for their beauty and intellect such as Phryne, Laïs of Corinth, Gnathæna, and Aspasia, were objects of universal admiration among the most distinguished Greeks. They were admitted to their assemblies and banquets, while the ‘honest’ women of Greece were, without exception, confined to the house.... A considerable number of women preferred the greater freedom which they enjoyed as Hetairai to marriage, and carried on the trade of prostitution as a means of livelihood. In unrestrained 47intercourse with men, the more intelligent of the Hetairai, who were doubtless often of good birth, acquired a far greater degree of versatility and culture than that possessed by the majority of married women, living in a state of enforced ignorance and bondage. This invested the Hetairai with a greater charm for the men, in addition to the arts which they employed in the special exercise of their profession. This explains the fact that many of them enjoyed the esteem of some of the most distinguished and eminent men of Greece, to whom they stood in a relationship of influential intimacy, a position held by no legitimate wife. The names of these Hetairai are famous to the present day, while one enquires in vain after the names of the legitimate wives.”—August Bebel (“Woman,” Chap. I.).

7.—“... wealth, or ... fame.”

E.g., Phryne, who offered to rebuild the wall of Thebes; and Laïs, commemorated in the adage, “Non cuivis hominum contingit adire Corinthum.” And as to even modern “fame,” a writer so merciless concerning her own sex as Mrs. Lynn Linton can yet say, “Agnes Sorel, like Aspasia, was one of the rare instances in history where failure in chastity did not include moral degradation nor unpatriotic self-consideration.”—(Nineteenth Century, July, 1891, p. 84.)

8.—“... the tinge of shame.”

Why indeed should shame have attached specially to those women, more highly cultured and better treated than wives; and whose sole impeachment could be that they rejected the still lower serfdom of wedded bondage?

48

XIII.

2.—“To him who fixed the gages of the fight.”

“If we could imagine a Bossuet or a Fénélon figuring among the followers of Ninon de Lenclos, and publicly giving her counsel on the subject of her professional duties, and the means of securing adorers, this would be hardly less strange than the relation which really existed between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota.”—Lecky (“History of European Morals,” Vol. II., p. 280).

8.—“The waste of woman worth ...”

Since these words were written, a letter from Mrs. Mona Caird has been published by the “Women’s Emancipation Union,” in which is said:—“So far from giving safety and balance to the ‘natural forces,’ these time-honoured restrictions, springing from a narrow theory which took its rise in a pre-scientific age, are fraught with the gravest dangers, creating a perpetual struggle and unrest, filling society with the perturbations and morbid developments of powers that ought to be spending themselves freely and healthfully on their natural objects. Anyone who has looked a little below the surface of women’s lives can testify to the general unrest and nervous exhaustion or malaise among them, although each would probably refer her suffering to some cause peculiar to herself and her circumstances, never dreaming that she was the victim of an evil that gnaws at the very heart of society, making of almost every woman the heroine of a silent tragedy. I think few keen observers will deny that it is 49almost always the women of placid temperament, with very little sensibility, who are happy and contented; those of more highly wrought nervous systems and imaginative faculty, who are nevertheless capable of far greater joy than their calmer sisters, in nine cases out of ten are secretly intensely miserable. And the cause of this is not eternal and unalterable. The nervously organised being is not created to be miserable; but when intense vital energy is thwarted and misdirected—so long as the energy lasts—there must be intense suffering.... It is only when resignation sets in, when the ruling order convinces at last and tires out the rebel nerves and the keen intelligence, that we know that the living forces are defeated, and that death has come to quiet the suffering. All this is waste of human force, and far worse than waste.”

Id.... Alexandre Dumas fils says:—“Celles-là voient, de jour en jour, en sondant l’horizon toujours le même, s’effeuiller dans l’isolement, dans l’inaction, dans l’impuissance, les facultés divines qui leur avaient d’abord fait faire de si beaux rêves et dont il leur semble que l’expansion eût pu être matériellement et moralement si profitable aux autres et à elles-memes.”—(“Les Femmes qui Tuent et les Femmes qui Votent,” p. 107).

Id.... And Lady Florence Dixie has written:—“Nature gives strength and beauty to man, and Nature gives strength and beauty to woman. In this latter instance man flies in the face of Nature, and declares that she must be artificially restrained. Woman must not be allowed to grow up strong like man, because if she did the fact would establish her equality with him, and this cannot be tolerated. 50So the boy and man are allowed freedom of body, and are trained up to become muscular and strong, while the woman, by artificial, not natural, laws, is bidden to remain inactive and passive, and, in consequence, weak and undeveloped. Mentally it is the same. Nature has unmistakably given to woman a greater amount of brain power. This is at once perceivable in childhood. For instance, on the stage, girls are always employed in preference to boys, for they are considered brighter and sharper in intellect and brain power. Yet man deliberately sets himself to stunt that early evidence of mental capacity by laying down the law that woman’s education shall be on a lower level than that of man’s; that natural truths, which all women should early learn, should be hidden from her; and that while men may be taught everything, women must only acquire a narrow and imperfect knowledge both of life and of Nature’s laws. I maintain that this procedure is arbitrary and cruel, and false to Nature. I characterise it by the strong word of infamous. It has been the means of sending to their graves, unknown, unknelled, and unnamed, thousands of women whose high intellects have been wasted, and whose powers for good have been paralysed and undeveloped.”—(“Gloriana: or, the Revolution of 1900,” p. 130.)

Id.... Buckle gives numerous instances which support the foregoing assertions, saying himself on the point:—“That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker than men, is a proposition which some persons will not relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed, nothing could prevent its being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity with 51which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous system called their education, in which valuable things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are irreparably injured.”—(“Miscellaneous Works,” Vol. I., p. 8, “On the influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge.”)

Id.... As a man of straightforward common-sense, Sydney Smith has left a name unsurpassed in our literary history. Here is something of what he says on this question of woman’s intellect and its waste:—“As the matter stands at present, half the talent in the universe runs to waste, and is totally unprofitable. It would have been almost as well for the world, hitherto, that women, instead of possessing the capacities they do at present, should have been born wholly destitute of wit, genius, and every other attribute of mind of which men make so eminent a use; and the ideas of use and possession are so united together that, because it has been the custom in almost all countries to give to women a different and worse education than to men, the notion has obtained that they do not possess faculties which they do not cultivate.”—(“Essay on Female Education.”)

Id.... Hear also John Ruskin on the relative intellect or capacity of women:—“Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea (and it must be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with respect to man’s; and how their relations, rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigour, and honour, and authority of both.... Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of 52all ages are agreed in anywise on this point.... And first let us take Shakespeare; ... there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose.... Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare’s testimony to the position and character of women in human life. He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, incorruptibly just and pure examples, strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.... I ask you next to receive the witness of Walter Scott.... So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over or educates his mistress.

“Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you, if I had time. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people, how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver’s shuttle; and how the name and form of that spirit adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm and cloudy shield, to whose faith you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue.

“But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I will only ask you to give the legitimate value to the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, consistent as you see it is on this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious and 53idle view of the relations between man and woman; nay, worse than fictitious or idle, for a thing may be imaginary yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of women, is, according to our common idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide nor even to think for herself. The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as in power. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter? Are Shakespeare and Æschylus, Dante and Homer merely dressing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realisation of which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all households, and ruin into all affections? Are all these great men mistaken, or, are we?”—(“Sesame and Lilies,” p. 125, et seq.)

Truly, in the face of these things, Tennyson had reason concerning his fellow men, when he wrote:—

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers....”

(“Locksley Hall.”)

XIV.

3.—“... lostling ...”

Between the most cultured hetairai and the poor outcast as here shown, were many intervening or coalescing grades. Instance, as one of the phases, the following sketch of an Indian courtesan:—“Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmama, and that was before the days of Eve, as everyone knows. In the West, people say rude things 54about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young people, in order that morality may be preserved. In the East, where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice.”—Rudyard Kipling (“On the City Wall”).

Id.—“... worse than brutal woes ...”

Dumas fils, who knew well whereof he wrote, tells of “Les femmes du peuple et de la campagne, suant du matin au soir pour gagner le pain quotidien, le dos courbé, domptées par la misère:” of whom some of the daughters “sortent du groupe par le chemin tentant et facile de la prostitution, mais où le labeur est encore plus rude.”—(“Les Femmes qui Tuent et les Femmes qui Votent,” p. 101.) As historical instance of depth of wretched degradation, conf. mediæval privilege of “scortum ante mortem,” conceded to some of even the vilest and lowest of criminals condemned to capital punishment. Though such a condition is barely more than parallel to the pitch of infamy of modern times, as instanced in a quotation reproduced by John Ruskin, in “Sesame and Lilies,” p. 91, first ed.:—

“The salons of Mme. C., who did the honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, in fact, with the same male company as one meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor the supper-tables were loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the menu of the supper which was 55served to all the guests (about 200) seated, at four o’clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Lafitte, Tokay, and Champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout the morning. After supper dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the ball terminated with a chaine diabolique and a cancan d’enfer at seven in the morning.”—(Morning Post, March 10th, 1865.)

To which perhaps the most fitting comment is certain words of Letourneau’s:—“It is important to make a distinction. The resemblance between the moral coarseness of the savage and the depravation of the civilised man is quite superficial.... The brutality of the savage has nothing in common with the moral retrogression of the civilised man, struck with decay.... The posterity of the savage may, with the aid of time and culture, attain to great moral elevation, for there are vital forces within him which are fresh and intact. The primitive man is still young, and he possesses many latent energies susceptible of development. In short, the savage is a child, while the civilised man, whose moral nature is corrupt, presents to us rather the picture of decrepit old age.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. V.)

If M. Letourneau will apply his strictures as to senility and decay to so-called “Society” and its system, rather than to the individual, he will find many thinkers, both of his own and other nationalities, agree with his conclusion. Yet not death, but reform, is the righter event to indicate. And by what means that reform may be ensured is, at least in part, clearly set forth in the following passage from a paper recently published by the Women’s Printing Society:—

56“My positive belief is that women, and women alone, will be able to reverse the world’s verdict, but they must change their method of reform in two important matters.

“First and foremost, every mother must teach her daughters the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the relations of the sexes, the condition of social opinion, the historical, physiological, ethical aspects of the question. She must train herself so as to be able to teach the young minds these solemn, serious aspects of life, in such a way that the world may learn that the innocence of ignorance is inferior to the purity of right-minded, fearless knowledge. She must strengthen the minds and form the judgment of her daughters, so that they may demand reciprocal purity in those whom they would espouse.

“I fully understand the difficulty of teaching our pure-minded, delicately-nurtured daughters the terrible lessons of this seamy side of life. I am a mother of daughters myself, and I know the cost at which the courage has to be obtained, but in this matter each mother must help another. What a mighty force is influence! What help is conveyed by pressure of opinion! How often do I remember with gratitude the words which I once read as quoted of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, who taught her little daughter to have the courage to hear what other little girls had to bear. How gladly I acknowledge the stimulus of that example to myself, and therefore I would urge all women to SPEAK OUT. Do not be afraid. You will not lose your womanliness. You will not lose your purity. You will not have your sensibilities blunted by such rough use. No, “To the pure all things are pure.” We must reach the mass through the unit, it is the individual who helps to move the world.

“We must teach and train the mind of every woman with whom we come in contact, for we have mighty work to do. A no less deed than to reverse the judgment of the whole world on the subject of purity. I do not believe it is possible for men to accomplish any radical reform in this matter. It belongs to women—I was going to say exclusively—but I will modify my assertion; and if women do not speak out more courageously in the future than they have done in the past, I believe there is but slight chance of any further amelioration in the condition of society than those which are such an inadequate return at the present time, for all the love and money expended on them.”

57And the same writer says, on a still more recent occasion: “I find no words strong enough to denounce the sin of silence amongst women on these social evils; and I have come to feel that the best proof of the subjection and degradation of my sex lies in the opinions often expressed by so-called Christian and pure women about other women. If their judgments were not perverted, if their wills were not broken, if their consciences were not asleep, and if their souls were not enslaved, they would not, they could not, hold their peace and let the havoc go on with women and children as it does.”—Mrs. Laura E. Morgan-Browne (“Woman’s Herald”, 27th Feb., 1892).

Mrs. Morgan-Browne is, perhaps, not more than needfully severe on the almost criminal reticence of women; yet man must certainly take the greater share of blame for the social “double morality” which condemns irrevocably a woman, and leaves practically unscathed a man, for the same act. It is male-made laws and rules that have resulted in the perverted judgments, broken wills, sleeping consciences, and enslaved souls, which both sexes may deplore. Charles Kingsley pointed a cogent truth when he said that “Women will never obtain moral equity until they have civil equality.” (See also Note XXXV., 6.)

XV.

2.—“... woman’s griefs with man of barbarous breed.”

“In all barbarous societies the subjection of woman is more or less severe; customs or coarse laws have regulated the savagery of the first anarchic ages; they have doubtless 58set up a barrier against primitive ferocity, they have interdicted certain absolutely terrible abuses of force, but they have only replaced these by a servitude which is still very heavy, is often iniquitous, and no longer permits to legally-possessed women those escapes, or capriciously accorded liberties, which were tolerated in savage life.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIV.).

4.—“Crippled and crushed by cruelty and toil.”

Some of this crippling has been of set purpose, as well as the simple result of brutal male recklessness. Instance the distortion of the feet of high-born female children in China, the tradition concerning which is that the practice was initiated and enjoined by an emperor of old, one of whose wives had (literally) “run away” from him. A somewhat similar precaution would seem to be indicated as a very probable source of the persistent and almost universal incommodity and incumbrance of the dress of woman as compared with that of man.

Dr. Thomas Inman, in his “Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names,” Vol. I., p. 53, seems to indicate a different, yet closely allied, origin and motive for the impeding form of woman’s clothing, the subordinate status of woman being always the purpose in view.

Id.... “Even supposing a woman to give no encouragement to her admirers, many plots are always laid to carry her off. In the encounters which result from these, she is almost certain to receive some violent injury, for each of the combatants orders her to follow him, and, in the event of her refusing, throws a spear at her. The early 59life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivities to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wandering in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought, a stranger, by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off successively to distant and more distant points.”—Sir George Grey (“Travels in North-Western Australia,” 1841, Vol. II., p. 249; quoted in M’Lennan on “Primitive Marriage,” p. 75).

5.—“... her heart a gentle mien essayed.”

“Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in greater tenderness and less selfishness, and this holds good even with savages, as shown by a well-known passage in “Mungo Park’s Travels,” and by statements made by other travellers. Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she should often extend them towards her fellow creatures.”... “Mungo Park heard the negro women teaching their young children to love the truth.”—Darwin (“The Descent of Man,” Chaps. IX., III.).

6.—“By deeper passion, holier impulse, swayed.”

Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham well says:—“Woman has accepted her subordinate lot, and lived in it with comparatively little 60moral harm, as the only truly superior and noble being could have done. The masculine spirit, enslaved and imprisoned, becomes diabolic or broken; the feminine, only warped, weakened, or distorted, is ready, whenever the pressure upon it is removed, to assume its true attitude.”—(“Woman and Her Era,” Part IV.)

Id.... Perhaps as appositely here, as elsewhere, may be recorded the following:—“An American writer says: ‘While I lived among the Choctaw Indians, I held a consultation with one of their chiefs respecting the successive stages of their progress in the arts of civilised life, and, among other things, he informed me that at their start they made a great mistake, they only sent boys to school. Their boys came home intelligent men, but they married uneducated and uncivilised wives, and the uniform result was that the children were all like their mothers. The father soon lost all his interest both in wife and children. And now,’ said he, ‘if we could educate but one class of our children, we should choose the girls, for, when they become mothers, they educate their sons.’ This is the point, and it is true.”—(Manchester Examiner and Times, Sept., 1870.)

8.—“... mother-love alone the infant oft preserved.”

In Polynesia, “if a child was born, the husband was free to kill the infant, which was done by applying a piece of wet stuff to the mouth and nose, or to let it live; but, in the latter case, he generally kept the wife for the whole of her life. If the union was sterile, or the children put to death, the man had always the right to 61abandon the woman when and how it seemed good to him.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” p. 113).

Id.... An Arab legend tells of a chief of Tamin, who became a constant practitioner of infanticide in consequence of a wound given to his pride ... and from that moment he interred alive all his daughters, according to the ancient custom. But one day, during his absence, a daughter was born to him, whom the mother secretly sent to a relative to save her, and then declared to her husband that she had been delivered of a still-born child.—(R. Smith, on “Kinship,” p. 282; quoted by Letourneau, “Evolution of Marriage,” p. 83.)

Id.... Charles Darwin writes of Tierra del Fuego:—“The husband is to the wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed ever perpetrated than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding, dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs!”—(“Voyage of the Beagle,” Chap. X.)

Id.... Mrs. Reichardt tells of a certain Moslem, of high standing in the society of Damascus, who “married a young girl of ten, and, after she had born him two sons, he drove her almost mad with such cruelty and unkindness that she escaped, and went back to her father. Her husband sent for her to return, and, as she was hidden out of his sight, he wrung the necks of both his sons, and sent their bodies to his wife to show her what he had in store for her. The young mother, not yet twenty, died in a few days.”—(See Nineteenth Century, June, 1891.)

Id.... It will not be forgotten that, in more than one 62of the older civilisations, the father had the power of life and death over the members of the family, even past adult age.

And, to come to quite recent times, and this our England, Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, to whose unflagging energy, during some fifteen years of labour, was mainly attributable (as the Parliamentary sponsors of the measures know) the amelioration in the English law concerning wives and mothers, embodied in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, together with the later and beneficent Guardianship of Infants Act, 1886, relates, in her record of the history of this latter Act:—

“It will be remembered that so recently as 1883, a young lady petitioned that she might be allowed to spend her summer holidays with her own mother, from whom she was separated for no fault of her own or of her mother’s, but in virtue of the supreme legal rights of her father. The Court refused her petition, natural and proper as it seems to everyone of human feelings; and the words of the Master of the Rolls in giving judgment, on the 24th of July, 1883, are more significant and instructive as to the actual state of the law than the words of any non-professional writer can be:—‘The law of England recognises the rights of the father, not as the guardian, but because he is the father of his children.... The rights of the father are recognised because he is the father; his duties as a father are recognised because they are natural duties. The natural duties of a father are to treat his children with the utmost affection, and with infinite tenderness.... The law recognises these duties, from which if a father breaks he breaks from everything which nature calls upon him to do; and, although the law may not be able to insist upon their performance, it is because the law recognises them, and knows that in almost every case the natural feelings of a father will prevail. The law trusts that the father will perform his natural duties, and does not, and, indeed, cannot, inquire how they have been performed.... I am not prepared to say whether when the child is a ward of Court, and the conduct of the father is such as to exhaust all patience—such, for instance, as cruelty, or 63pitiless spitefulness carried to a great extent—the Court might not interfere. But such interference will be exercised ONLY IN THE UTMOST NEED, AND IN MOST EXTREME CASES. It is impossible to lay down the rule of the Court more clearly than has been done by Vice-Chancellor Bacon in the recent case of “Re. Plowley” (47 “L.T.,” N.S., 283). In saying that this Court, “whatever be its authority or jurisdiction, has no authority to interfere with the sacred right of a father over his own children,” the learned Vice-Chancellor has summed up all that I intended to say. The rights of a father are sacred rights, because his duties are sacred....’

“These sacred rights of the father were, it will be observed, in the eyes of the law so exclusive and paramount as to justify and demand the refusal to a young girl, at the most critical period of early womanhood, of the solace of a few weeks’ intercourse with a blameless and beloved mother; and this although the gratification of the daughter’s wish would have involved no denial to the father of the solace of his daughter’s company, since she was not actually, but only legally, in his custody, not having seen him for more than a year.

“It will be seen from this that the father alone has the absolute legal right to deal with his child or children, to the extent of separating them, at his own sole pleasure, from their mother, and of giving them into the care and custody of any person whom he may think fit. The mother has, as such, no legal status, no choice, voice, lot, or part in the matter.”—Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy (“The Infants’ Act, 1886,” p. 2).

It is consolatory to learn that a palliation of some part of the above unjust conditions has been achieved; yet how often has our presumedly happy land witnessed scenes of child misery and helpless mother-love, to which was denied even the poor consolation, so pathetically depicted by Mrs. Browning, in a scene which, as Moir truly says, “weighs on the heart like a nightmare”;—

“Do you hear the children weeping, oh! my brothers!

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears.”

64

XVI.

4.—“... single basis ...”

First written “disproportioned basis,” but altered, with good reason, in the face of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s arrogant male thesis:—“Only that mental energy is normally feminine which can co-exist with the production and nursing of the due (!) number of healthy children.”—(“Study of Sociology,” Chap. XV., note 5.)

But Professor Huxley speaks, more humanly, of “... such a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, and with mind bent only on her home; but yet, without effort and without thought, knitting for her children. Now stockings are good and comfortable things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the better for them, but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother as a mere stocking-machine—a mere provider of physical comforts.”—(“On Improving Natural Knowledge.”)

Yet, if it be—as truly it is—a senseless and disgraceful depreciation of woman to look upon her as “a mere machine for the making of stockings,” is it not equally unworthy and unwise to consider her as—primarily and essentially—a mere machine for the making of a “due” number of stocking-wearers?

5.—“... quicker fire.”

In even so sedate and usually dispassionate a physiologist and philosopher as Charles Darwin, the masculine sex-bias is so ingrained and so ingenuous that he strives to disparage 65and contemn the notorious mental quickness or intuition of woman by saying:—“It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.”—(“The Descent of Man,” Chap. XIX.).

His unconscious sex-bias apparently overlooked the pregnant and very pertinent caution which he had himself uttered in a previous work:—“Useful organs, however little they may be developed, unless we have reason to suppose that they were formerly more highly developed, ought not to be considered as rudimentary. They may be in a nascent condition, and in progress towards further development. Rudimentary organs, on the other hand, are either quite useless, such as teeth which never cut through the gums, or, almost useless, such as the wings of an ostrich, which serve merely as sails.... It is, however, often difficult to distinguish between rudimentary and nascent organs, for we can judge only by analogy whether a part is capable of further development, in which case alone it deserves to be called nascent.”—(“Origin of Species,” Chap. XIV.).

But surely Darwin would admit that experiment in capacity of education and development was as worthy evidence as “analogy,” and would further acknowledge how little effort in this direction had ever been made with woman. Buckle would seem to be far nearer the truth in ascribing to woman an unconscious deductive form of 66reasoning, as against the slow and studied inductive process to which man is so generally trained to be a slave.—(See Buckle’s Essay on the “Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge,” as quoted from in Note XIII., 8.)

7.—“... one permitted end ...”

“The function of child-bearing has been exaggerated to an utterly disproportionate degree in her life; it has been made her almost sole claim to existence. Yet 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.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).

Id. ... “... not a moth with vain desire

Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another’s gain.”

—Tennyson (“In Memoriam,” LIV.).

XVII.

5.—“... aspirations crushed ...”

“I have found life a series of hopes unfulfilled and wishes ungratified.”—(Dying words of a talented woman.)

6.—“... purblind pride ...”

“Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense.”

—Pope.

7.—“Her every wish made subject ...”

For a somewhat modern exemplification may be taken 67the instance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Paris with her husband, in 1852. She writes of Georges Sand:—“She received us in a room with a bed in it, the only room she has to occupy, I suppose, during her short stay in Paris.... Ah, but I didn’t see her smoke; I was unfortunate. I could only go with Robert three times to her house, and once she was out. He was really very good and kind to let me go at all after he found the sort of society rampant around her. He didn’t like it extremely, but, being the prince of husbands, he was lenient to my desires, and yielded the point.”—(“Life of Robert Browning,” by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, 1891.)

8.—“... her God.”

Conf. Milton (“Paradise Lost,” Book IV., 299):—

“He for God only, she for God in him.”

See Note XXXV., 5. Compare also the Code of Manu, v. 154, as quoted by Letourneau:—“Although the conduct of her husband may be blameworthy, and he may give himself up to other amours, and be devoid of good qualities, a virtuous woman ought constantly to revere him as a God.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIII.)

Id.... Here may fittingly be appended some masculine concepts of feminine duty in other races.

The Status of Woman, according to the Chinese Classics:—

In a periodical published in Shanghai, Dr. Faber, a well-known scholar, writes (1891) a paper on the status of women in China. He refers especially to the theoretical 68position assigned to women by the Chinese Classics. These lay down the different dogmas on the subject:

“1.—Women are as different in nature from man as earth is from heaven.

“2.—Dualism, not only in body form, but in the very essence of nature, is indicated and proclaimed by Chinese moralists of all times and creed. The male belongs to yang, the female to yin.

“3.—Death and all other evils have their origin in the yin, or female principle; life and prosperity come from its subjection to the yang or male principle; and it is therefore regarded as a law of nature that women should be kept under the control of men, and not be allowed any will of their own.

“4.—Women, indeed, are human beings, (!) but they are of a lower state than men, and can never attain to full equality with them.

“5.—The aim of female education, therefore, is perfect submission, not cultivation and development of mind.

“6.—Women cannot have any happiness of their own; they have to live and work for men.

“7.—Only as the mother of a son, as the continuator of the direct line of a family, can a woman escape from her degradation and become to a certain degree her husband’s equal; but then only in household affairs, especially the female department, and in the ancestral hall.

69“8.—In the other world, woman’s condition remains exactly the same, for the same laws of existence apply. She is not the equal of her husband; she belongs to him, and is dependent for her happiness on the sacrifice offered by her descendants.

“These are the doctrines taught by Confucius, Mencius, and the ancient sages, whose memory has been revered in China for thousands of years.”

And now, what wonder that Chinese civilisation and progress is, and remains, fossilised, inert, dead?

Japan.

“There is one supreme maxim upon which the conduct of a well-bred woman is made to turn, and this is ‘obedience.’ Life, the Japanese girl is taught, divides itself into three stages of obedience. In youth she is to obey her father; in marriage her husband; in widowhood her eldest son. Hence her preparation for life is always preparation for service. The marriage of the Japanese girl usually takes place when she is about seventeen. It is contrary to all custom that she should have any voice in it. Once married, she passes from her father’s household into the household of her husband, and her period of self-abnegation begins. Her own family is to be as nothing to her. Her duty is to charm the existence of her husband, and to please his relations. Custom demands that she shall always smile upon him, and that she shall carefully hide from him any signs of bad humour, jealousy, or physical pain.”—Tinseau (quoted in Review of Reviews, Vol. IV., p. 282.)

70Note well the last two words of the above quotation; they have a bearing on much that will have to be said presently. Meanwhile, we read from another writer: “The expression, res angusta domi, might have been invented for Japan, so narrow of necessity is the wife’s home life. The husband mixes with the world, the wife does not; the husband has been somewhat inspired, and his thoughts widened by his intercourse with foreigners, the wife has not met them. The husband has more or less acquaintance with western learning; the wife has none. Affection between the two, within the limits which unequal intellectuality ruthlessly prescribes, there well may be, but the love which comes of a perfect intimacy, of mutual knowledge and common aspiration, there can rarely be. The very vocabulary of romantic love does not exist in Japanese; a fortiori, there is little of the fact.” Yet, under the influence of western civilisation, these things are changing rapidly, and Mr. Norman, the commissioner of the Pall Mall Gazette, further relates that “The generation that is now growing up will be very different. Not only will the men of it be more western, but the women also. As girls they will have been to schools like our schools at home, and they will have learned English, and history, and geography, and science, and foreign music; perhaps, even, something of politics and political economy. They will know something of ‘society,’ as we now use the term, and will both seek it and make it. The old home life will become unbearable to the woman, and she will demand the right of choosing her husband just as much as he chooses her. Then the rest will be easy.”

71The harsh and restrained position, both of Japanese and Chinese women, is frequently attributed to Confucianism; yet the matter does not seem to be of any one creed, but rather of every religious creed. Thus Mrs. Reichardt tells us, concerning Mahommedan women and Mahommedan married life, that—

“A Mahommedan girl is brought up with the idea that she has nothing to do with love. It is ayib (shame) for her to love her husband. She dare not do it if she would. What he asks and expects of her is to tremble before him, and yield him unquestioning obedience. I have seen a husband look pleased and complacent when his wife looked afraid to lift up her eyes, even when visitors were present.”—(Nineteenth Century, June, 1891.)

Nor is Confucius alone, or the simple contagion of his teaching, rightly to be blamed for the following condition of things in our own dependency of

India.

The Bombay Guardian calls attention to an extraordinary book which is being circulated (early in 1891) broadcast, as a prize-book in the Government Girls’ School in the Bombay Presidency. The following quotations are given as specimens of the teachings set forth in the book:—

“If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of good or bad disposition, diseased, fiendish, irascible, or a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind, deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, cowardly, perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she ought to worship him as God, with mind, speech, and person.

72“The wife who gives an angry answer to her husband will become a village pariah dog; she will also become a jackal, and live in an uninhabited desert.

“The woman who eats sweetmeats without sharing them with her husband will become a hen-owl, living in a hollow tree.—(Conf. Note VI., 8.)

“The woman who walks alone without her husband will become a filth-eating village sow.

“The woman who speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb in the next incarnation.

“The woman who hates her husband’s relations will become from birth to birth a musk-rat, living in filth.

“She who is always jealous of her husband’s concubine will be childless in the next incarnation.”

To illustrate the blessed result of a wife’s subserviency, a story is told of “the great reward that came to the wife of an ill-tempered, diseased, and wicked Brahmin, who served her husband with a slavish obedience, and even went the length of carrying him on her own shoulders to visit his mistress.”

So quotes the Woman’s Journal of Boston, Mass., and says in comment thereon:—“The British Government in India has bound itself not to interfere with the religion of the natives, but it certainly ought not to inculcate in Government schools the worst doctrines of heathenism.”

Yet, again, are these Hindoo, or Japanese, or Chinese doctrines simply the precepts of “heathenism” alone? Buckle quotes for us the following passage from the Nonconformist “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p. 242:—“There is not any husband to whom this honour 73of submission is not due. No personal infirmity, frowardness of nature, no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it.”

Much the same teaching is continued a century later in the noted Dr. Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters”; and again, hideously true is the picture which Mill has to draw, in 1869:—“Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to, though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him, he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.... No amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.”—(“The Subjection of Women,” pp. 57, 59.)

As to how far public feeling, if not law, has amended some of these conditions, see Note XXXVI., 6. Meanwhile, as an evidence of what is the “orthodox” opinion and sentiment at this present day, it may be noted that Cardinal Manning wrote in the Dublin Review, July, 1891:—“A woman enters for life into a sacred contract with a man before God at the altar to fulfil to him the duties of wife, mother, and head of his home. Is it lawful for her, even with his consent, to make afterwards a second contract for so many shillings a week with a millowner whereby 74she becomes unable to provide her husband’s food, train up her children, or do the duties of her home? It is no question of the lawfulness of gaining a few more shillings for the expenses of a family, but of the lawfulness of breaking a prior contract, the most solemn between man and woman. No arguments of expediency can be admitted. It is an obligation of conscience to which all things must give way. The duties of home must first be done” (by the woman) “then other questions may be entertained.”

Are not these English injunctions to womanly and wifely slavery as trenchant and merciless as any ascribed to so-called “heathenism”? And is it not the fuller truth that the spirit of the male teaching against woman is the same all the world over, and no mere matter of creed—which is nevertheless made the convenient vehicle for such teaching; and that, in brief, the precepts of womanly and wifely servitude are blind, brutal, and universal?

See also Note XXXIV., 8.

XVIII.

8.—“To compass power unknown in body and in mind.”

“We need a new ethic of the sexes, and this not merely, or even mainly, as an intellectual construction, but as a discipline of life, and we need more. We need an increasing education and civism of women.”—P. Geddes and J. A. Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” p. 297).

Newnham and Girton, Vassar and Zurich, are already rendering account of woman’s scope of mental power; while the circus, the gymnasium, swimming and mountaineering 75are showing what she might do corporeally, apart from her hideous and literally impeding style of clothing. As for some other forms of utilitarian occupation, read the following concerning certain of the Lancashire women:—

“Mr. Edgar L. Wakeman, an observant American author, is at present on a visit to this country, and is giving his countrymen the benefit of his impressions of English life and social conditions.

“The ‘pit-brow’ lasses of the Wigan district will not need to complain, for he writes of them not only in a kindly spirit, but even with enthusiasm for their healthy looks, graceful figures, and good conduct. We need not follow his description of the processes in which the women of the colliery are employed, but we may say in passing that Mr. Wakeman was astonished by the ‘wonderful quickness of eye and movement’ shown by the ‘screeners,’ and by the ‘superb physical development’ and agility of the ‘fillers.’ He had expected to find them ‘the most forlorn creatures bearing the image of women,’ and he found them strong, healthy, good-natured, and thoroughly respectable. ‘English roses glow from English cheeks. You cannot find plumper figures, prettier forms, more shapely necks, or daintier feet, despite the ugly clogs, in all of dreamful Andalusia. The “broo gear” is laid aside on the return home from work, and then the “pit-brow” lass is arrayed as becomingly as any of her class in England, and in the village street, or at church of a Sunday, you could not pick her out from among her companions, unless for her fine colour, form, and a positively classic poise and grace of carriage possessed by no other working women of England. 76Altogether,’ he says, ‘I should seriously regard the pit-brow lasses as the handsomest, healthiest, happiest, and most respectable working women in England.’—(Manchester Guardian, Aug. 28, 1891.)

Id.... Concerning the question of male and female dress, evidence as to how far woman has been hindered and “handicapped” by her conventional attire, and not by her want of physical strength or courage, is reported from time to time in the public prints, as witness the following, published generally in the English newspapers of 14th Oct., 1891:—

“Not long since a well-known European courier, having grown grey in his occupation, fell ill, and like others similarly afflicted, was compelled to call in a doctor. This gentleman was completely taken by surprise on discovering that his patient was a female. Then the sick woman—who had piloted numerous English and American families through the land of the Latin, the Turk, and others, and led timid tourists safely through many imaginary dangers—confessed that she had worn men’s clothes for forty years. She stated that her reasons for this masquerade were that having, at the age of thirteen, been left a friendless orphan, she had become convinced, after futile struggling for employment, that many of the obstacles in her path could be swept away by discarding her proper garments and assuming the rôle and attire of masculine youth. This she did. She closely cut her hair, bought boy’s clothes, put them on, and sallied forth in the world to seek her fortune. With the change of dress seems to have come a change of luck, for she quickly found employment, and being an apt scholar, and facile at learning languages, was enabled after a time to obtain a position as courier, and, but for her unfortunate illness, it is tolerably certain that the truth would never have been revealed during her lifetime.”

In the early days of April, 1892, the Vienna correspondent of the Standard reported that—

77“On the 30th ult., there died in Hungary, at about the same hour, two ladies who served in 1848 in the Revolutionary Army, and fought in several of the fiercest battles, dressed in military uniform. One of them was several times promoted, and, under the name of Karl, attained the rank of First Lieutenant of Hussars. At this point, however, an artillery major stopped her military career by marrying her. The other fought under the name of Josef, and was decorated for valour in the field. She married long after the campaign. A Hungarian paper, referring to the two cases, says that about a dozen women fought in 1848 in the insurrectionary ranks.”

Somewhat more detailed particulars concerning “Lieutenant Karl” were afterwards given by the Manchester Guardian (June 6, 1892), as follows:—

“The Austrian Volkszeitung announces the death of Frau Marie Hoche, who has had a most singular and romantic career. Her maiden name was Lepstuk. In the momentous year of 1848 Marie Lepstuk, who was then eighteen years of age, joined the German legion at Vienna; then, returning home, she adopted the name of Karl and joined the Tyroler Jager Regiment of the revolutionary army. She showed great bravery in the battlefield, received the medallion, and was raised to the rank of lieutenant. A wound compelled her to go into hospital, but after her recovery she joined the Hussars. As a reward for exceeding bravery she was next made oberlieutenant on the field. Soon after this her sex was discovered, but a major fell in love with her, and they were married. At Vilagos both were taken prisoners, and while in the fortress she gave birth to her first child. After the major’s death she was remarried to Oberlieutenant Hoche. For the past few years Frau Hoche has been in needy circumstances, but an appeal from Jokai brought relief.”

All of which goes far to discredit M. Michelet’s theory that women are “born invalids,” an assertion which Dr. Julia Mitchell “stigmatises naturally enough as ‘all nonsense,’” and is thus approved—with a strange magnanimity—by 78the British Medical Journal.—(See Pall Mall Gazette, April 29, 1892.)

The “incapacity of women for military service” has been of late days continually quoted as a bar to their right of citizenship, as far as the Parliamentary Franchise is concerned. In the face of the foregoing cases, and of the fact that every mother risks her life in becoming a mother, while very few men, indeed, risk theirs on the battlefield, it might be thought that the fallacious argument would have perished from shame and inanition long ago. But the inconsistencies of partly-cultivated, masculine, one-sexed intellect are as stubborn as blind.

See also Note XLV., 6.

XIX.

6.—“The ecstasy of earnest souls ...”

“Without recognising the possibilities of individual and of racial evolution, we are shut up to the conventional view that the poet and his heroine alike are exceptional creations, hopelessly beyond the everyday average of the race. Whereas, admitting the theory of evolution, we are not only entitled to the hope, but logically compelled to the assurance that these rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to gather, or, it may be, to see from distant heights, are yet the realities of a daily life towards which we and ours may journey.”—Geddes and Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).

Id.... “What marriage may be in the case of two 79persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers, and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the pleasure of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and cultivation.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 177).

XX.

2.—“And lingers still the hovering shade of night.”

George Eliot had yet to say, “Heaven was very cruel when it made women”; and Georges Sand, “Fille on nous supprime, femme on nous opprime.”

XXI.

1.—“... carnal servitude...”

It may be objected by some that details in the verse or 80in these notes are of too intimate a character for general narration. The notes have, however, all been taken either from widely read public prints of indisputable singleness of purpose, or works of writers of undoubted integrity. One is not much troubled as to those who would criticise further. To them may be offered the incident and words of the late Dr. Magee, who, as Bishop of Peterborough, and a member of a legislative committee on the question of child-life insurance, said:—“In this matter we have to count with two things: first, almost all our facts are secrets of the bedchamber; and, secondly, we are opposed by great vested interests. This thing is not to be done without a good deal of pain.”—(Review of Reviews, Vol. IV., p. 37).

And thus are verified, in a transcendental sense also, the words of Schiller:—

“Und in feurigem Bewegen

Werden alle Kräfte kund.”

(“Die Glocke.”)

7.—“Survival from dim age ...”

See Note XXIII., 1.

XXII.

1.—“... girlhood’s helpless years ...”

Somewhat as to these ancient conditions may be gathered from the position in India at the present day. Read the following:—“The practice of early marriages by Hindoos I was, of course, informed of by reading before coming to India, but its mention in books was always coupled with the assertion that in India girls reach puberty at a much 81earlier age than in cold climates. Judge, therefore, of my surprise to find that so far from Hindoo girls being precocious in physical development, they are much behind in this respect; that a Hindoo girl of fifteen is about the equal of an English child of eleven, instead of the reverse, and that the statements made to the contrary by Englishmen who have no opportunity of becoming acquainted with Hindoo family life, were totally misleading. In the first place they were under the impression that marriage never takes place before puberty, and, secondly, they accepted the Hindoo view as to what constitutes puberty. You know that, unfortunately, they were misled as regards the first point. I hope to show you that in the second place the idea which they accepted as correct is a totally mistaken one.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to the Hindoos of Bombay on the subject of child-marriage; delivered at the Hall of the Prarthana Somaj, Bombay, on the 11th Oct., 1890).

2.—“... sexual wrong.”

“As regards the marriage of girls before even what is called puberty, I can hardly trust myself to speak, so strongly are my feelings those of all Western—may I not say of all civilised?—people in looking upon it as actually criminal. Ah! gentlemen, those of you who are conversant with such cases as I have seen, cases like those of Phulmoni Dossee, which has just now stirred your hearts to insist upon some change in the existing law, and others where a life-long decrepitude has followed, to which death itself were far preferable, do you not feel with me that penal servitude 82is not too hard a punishment for such brutality? I am glad to think that a very large section of Hindoo men think with me. I have been repeatedly spoken to on the subject, and members even of those castes which are most guilty in this matter, have expressed to me a wish that Government would interfere and put a stop to the practice.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D., op. cit.

A terrible evidence to the evil is borne by the following document:—

[From “The Times of India,” November 8th, 1890.]

To his Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India.

May it please Your Excellency.—The undersigned ladies, practising medicine in India, respectfully crave your Excellency’s attention to the following facts and considerations:—

1. Your Excellency is aware that the present state of the Indian law permits marriages to be consummated not only before the wife is physically qualified for the duties of maternity, but before she is able to perform the duties of the conjugal relation, thus giving rise to numerous and great evils.

2. This marriage practice has become the cause of gross immoralities and cruelties, which, owing to existing legislation, come practically under the protection of the law. In some cases the law has permitted homicide, and protected men, who, under other circumstances, would have been criminally punished.

3. The institution of child-marriage rests upon public sentiment, vitiated by degenerate religious customs and misinterpretation of religious books. There are thousands among the better educated classes who would rejoice if Government would take the initiative, and make such a law as your memorialists plead for, and in the end the masses would be grateful for their deliverance from the galling yoke that has bound them to poverty, superstition, and the slavery of custom for centuries.

834. The present system of child-marriage, in addition to the physical and moral effects which the Indian Governments have deplored, produces sterility, and consequently becomes an excuse for the introduction of other child-wives into the family, thus becoming a justification for polygamy.

5. This system panders to sensuality, lowers the standard of health and morals, degrades the race, and tends to perpetuate itself and all its attendant evils to future generations.

6. The lamentable case of the child-wife, Phulmani Dassi, of Calcutta, which has excited the sympathy and the righteous indignation of the Indian public, is only one of thousands of cases that are continually happening, the final results being quite as horrible, but sometimes less immediate. The following instances have come under the personal observation of one or another of your Excellency’s petitioners:—

A. Aged 9. Day after marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape, flesh hanging in shreds.

B. Aged 10. Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated.

C. Aged 9. So completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair. Her husband had two other living wives, and spoke very fine English.

D. Aged 10. A very small child, and entirely undeveloped physically. This child was bleeding to death from the rectum. Her husband was a man of about 40 years of age, weighing not less than 11 stone. He had accomplished his desire in an unnatural way.

E. Aged about 9. Lower limbs completely paralysed.

F. Aged about 12. Laceration of the perineum extending through the sphincter ani.

G. Aged about 10. Very weak from loss of blood. Stated that great violence had been done her in an unnatural way.

H. Aged about 12. Pregnant, delivered by craniotomy with great difficulty, on account of the immature state of the pelvis and maternal passage.

84I. Aged about 7. Living with husband. Died in great agony after three days.

K. Aged about 10. Condition most pitiable. After one day in hospital was demanded by her husband for his “lawful” use, he said.

L. Aged 11. From great violence done her person will be a cripple for life. No use of her lower extremities.

M. Aged about 10. Crawled to hospital on her hands and knees. Has never been able to stand erect since her marriage.

N. Aged 9. Dislocation of pubic arch, and unable to stand, or to put one foot before the other.

In view of the above facts, the undersigned lady doctors and medical practitioners appeal to your Excellency’s compassion to enact or introduce a measure by which the consummation of marriage will not be permitted before the wife has attained the full age of fourteen (14) years. The undersigned venture to trust that the terrible urgency of the matter will be accepted as an excuse for this interruption of your Excellency’s time and attention.

(Signed by 55 lady-physicians.)

The memorial as above was initiated by Mrs. Monelle Mansell, M.A., M.D., who has been in practice in India for seventeen years, and it received the signature of every other lady doctor there. The cases of abuse above specified are “only a few out of many hundreds—of cruel wrongs, deaths, and maimings for life received by helpless child-wives at the hands of brutal husbands, which have come under Dr. Monelle Mansell’s personal observation, or that of her associates.”

With regard to case K, and “lawful” use, compare what is said by Dr. Emma B. Ryder, who is also in medical practice in India, concerning the “Little Wives of India”:—“If 85I could take my readers with me on my round of visits for one week, and let them behold the condition of the little wives ... if you could see the suffering faces of the little girls, who are drawn nearly double with contractions caused by the brutality of their husbands, and who will never be able to stand erect; if you could see the paralysed limbs that will not again move in obedience to the will; if you could hear the plaintive wail of the little sufferers as, with their tiny hands clasped, they beg you ‘to make them die,’ and then turn and listen to the brutal remarks of the legal owner with regard to the condition of his property. If you could stand with me by the side of the little deformed dead body, and, turning from the sickening sight, could be shown the new victim to whom the brute was already betrothed, do you think it would require long arguments to convince you that there was a deadly wrong somewhere, and that someone was responsible for it? After one such scene a Hindoo husband said to me, ‘You look like feel bad’ (meaning sad); ‘doctors ought not to care what see. I don’t care what see, nothing trouble me, only when self sick; I not like to have pain self.’... A man may be a vile and loathsome creature, he may be blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in a worse form; he may be fifty, seventy, or a hundred years old, and may be married to a baby or a girl of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence, but if he claims her she must go, and the English law for the ‘Restitution of Conjugal Rights’ compels her to remain in his power, or imprisons her if she refuses. There is no other form of slavery on the face of the earth that begins with the slavery as enforced upon these little girls of 86India.”—(“The Home-Maker,” New York, June, 1891, quoted in the Review of Reviews, Vol. IV., p. 38.)

And the Times of 11th November, 1889, reported from its Calcutta correspondent:—“Two shocking cases of wife-killing lately came before the courts—in both cases the result of child-marriage. In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband. In the second case a child of ten years was ripped open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared with the terrible evils of child-marriage, widow cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude. The public conscience is continually being affronted with these horrible atrocities, but, unfortunately, native public opinion generally seems to accept these revelations with complete apathy.”

For what slight legislative amendment has recently been effected in the grievances mentioned by Dr. Ryder, see Note XXIV., 4. The “Restitution of Conjugal Rights,” so justly condemned by her, does, indeed, appear to have had—by some inadvertence—a recognition in the Indian Courts which was not its lawful due. But for some fuller particulars on this matter, both as concerns India and England, see Note XXXVI., 6.

XXIII.

1.—“Action repeated tends to rhythmic course.”

“Other and wider muscular actions, partly internal and partly external, also take place in a rhythmical manner in relation with systemic conditions. The motions of the 87diaphragm and of the thoracic and abdominal walls, in connection with respiration, belong to this category. These movements, though in the main independent of will, are capable of being very considerably modified thereby, and while they are most frequently unheeded, they have a very recognisable accompaniment of feeling when attention is distinctly turned to them.... The contraction of oviducts or of the womb, as well as the movements concerned in respiration, also had their beginnings in forms of life whose advent is now buried in the immeasurable past.”—Dr. H. C. Bastian (“The Brain as an Organ of Mind,” p. 220).

4.—“Till habit bred hereditary trace.”

“Let it be granted that the more frequently psychical states occur in a certain order, the stronger becomes their tendency to cohere in that order, until they at last become inseparable; let it be granted that this tendency is, in however slight a degree, inherited, so that if the experiences remain the same, each successive generation bequeaths a somewhat increased tendency, and it follows that, in cases like the one described, there must eventually result an automatic connection of nervous actions, corresponding to the external relations perpetually experienced. Similarly, if from some change in the environment of any species its members are frequently brought in contact with a relation having terms a little more involved; if the organisation of the species is so far developed as to be impressible by these terms in close succession, then an inner relation corresponding to this new outer relation will gradually be formed, 88and will, in the end, become organic. And so on in subsequent stages of progress.”—Herbert Spencer (“Principles of Psychology,” Vol. I., p. 439).

Id.... “I have described the manner in which the hereditary tendencies and instincts arise from habit, induced in the nervous cellules by a sufficient repetition of the same acts.”—Letourneau (“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. I.).

Id.... “Ainsi l’évacuation menstruelle une fois introduite dans l’espèce, se sera communiquée par une filiation non interrompue; de sorte qu’on peut dire qu’une femme a maintenant des règles, par la seule raison que sa mère les a eues, comme elle aurait été phthisique peut être, si sa mère l’eût été; il y a plus, elle peut être sujette au flux menstruel, même quoique la cause primitive qui introduisit ce besoin ne subsiste plus en elle.”—Roussel (“Système de la Femme,” p. 134).

Id.... “Il y a eu des auteurs qui ne voulaient pas considérer la menstruation comme une fonction inhérente à la nature de la femme, mais comme une fonction acquise, continuant par l’habitude.”—Raciborski (“Traité de la Menstruation,” p. 17).

Id.... “The ‘set’ of mind, as Professor Tyndall well calls it, whether, as he says, ‘impressed upon the molecules of the brain,’ or conveyed in any other way, is quite as much a human as an animal phenomenon. Perhaps the greater part of those qualities which we call the characteristics of race are nothing else but the ‘set’ of the minds of men transmitted from generation to generation, stronger and more marked when the deeds are repeated, weaker and 89fainter as they fall into disuse.... Tyndall says: ‘No mother can wash or suckle her baby without having a “set” towards washing and suckling impressed upon the molecules of her brain, and this set, according to the laws of hereditary transmission, is passed on to her daughter. Not only, therefore, does the woman at the present day suffer deflection from intellectual pursuits through her proper motherly instincts, but inherited proclivities act upon her mind like a multiplying galvanometer, to augment indefinitely the amount of the deflection. Tendency is immanent even in spinsters, to warp them from intellect to baby-love.’ (Essay: “Odds and Ends of Alpine Life.”) Thus, if we could, by preaching our pet ideal, or in any other way induce one generation of women to turn to a new pursuit, we should have accomplished a step towards bending all future womanhood in the same direction.”—Frances Power Cobbe (Essay: “The Final Cause of Woman”).

See also Note XXVI., 7.

6.—“... e’en the virgin ...”

An experienced gynæcologist writes:—“For want of proper information in this matter, many a frightened girl has resorted to every conceivable device to check what she supposed to be an unnatural and dangerous hæmorrhage, and thereby inaugurated menstrual derangements which have prematurely terminated her life, or enfeebled her womanhood. I have been consulted by women of all ages, who frankly attributed their physical infirmities to the fact of their having applied ice, or made other cold applications 90locally, in their frantic endeavours to arrest the first menstrual flow.”

What general practitioner has not met with analogous instances in the circle of his own patients?

7.—“... ere fit ...”

“The physician, whose duty is not only to heal the sick, but also to prevent disease and to improve the race, and hence who must be a teacher of men and women, should teach sound doctrine in regard to the injurious results of precocious marriage. Mothers especially ought to be taught, though some have learned the lesson by their own sad experience, that puberty and nubility are not equivalent terms, but stand for periods of life usually separated by some years; the one indicates capability, the other fitness, for reproduction.”—Parvin (“Obstetrics,” p. 91).

Id.... “The general maturity of the whole frame is the true indication that the individual, whether male or female, has reached a fit age to reproduce the species. It is not one small and unimportant symptom by which this question must be judged. Many things go to make up virility in man; the beard, the male voice, the change in figure, and the change in disposition; and in girls there is a long period of development in the bust, in the hips, in bone and muscle, changes which take years for their proper accomplishment before the girl can be said to have grown into a woman. All this is not as a rule completed before the age of twenty. Woman’s form is not well developed before she is twenty years old; her pelvis, which has been called the 91laboratory of generation, has not its perfect shape until then; hence an earlier maternity is not desirable. If the demand is made on the system before that, the process of development is necessarily interfered with, and both mother and offspring suffer. Even in countries where the age of marriage is between twenty and twenty-five, where, therefore, the mother has not been weakened by early maternity, it is remarked that the strongest children are born to parents of middle age, i.e., from thirty-five to forty; this, the prime of life to the parent, is the happiest moment for the advent of her progeny.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to the Hindoos).

See also end of Note XXIV., 1.

8.—“Abnormal fruits of birth ...”

Dr. John Thorburn, in his “Lecture introductory to the Summer Course on Obstetric Medicine,” Victoria University, Manchester, 1884, says:—“Let me briefly remind you of what occurs at each menstrual period. During nearly one week out of every four there occurs the characteristic phenomenon of menstruation, which in itself has some temporary impoverishing effect, though, in health, nature speedily provides the means of recuperation. Along with this we have a marked disturbance in the circulation of the pelvis, leading to alterations in the weight, conformation, and position of the uterus. We have also tissue changes occurring, not perhaps yet thoroughly understood, but leading to ruptures in the ovary, and to exfoliation of the uterine lining membrane, a kind of modified abortion, in fact. 92These changes in most instances are accompanied by signs of pain and discomfort, which, if they were not periodic and physiological, would be considered as symptoms of disease.”

(The italics are not in the original.) Here is certainly cogent evidence of “abnormal fruit of birth,” and the learned doctor seems to be on the verge of making the involuntary discovery. But he follows the usual professional attempt (see Note XXX., 4) to class menstruation as a physiological and not a pathological fact; as a natural, painful incident, and not an acquired painful consequence. His half-declared argument, that, because an epoch of pain is periodic it is therefore not symptomatic of disease, is a theory as unsatisfactory as novel.

Id.... Some of the facts connected with parthenogenesis, alternate generation, the impregnation of insects, &c., passed on through more than one generation, would show by analogy this class of phenomena not extranatural or unprecedented, but abnormal and capable of rectification or reduction to pristine normality or non-existence. The fact of occasional instances of absence of menstruation, yet with a perfect potentiality of child-bearing, indicates this latter possibility. That the male being did not correspondingly suffer in personal physiological sequence is explicable on the ground that the masculine bodily function of parentage cannot be subjected to equal forced sexual abuse; though in the male sex also there is indication that excess may leave hereditary functional trace. And that, again, a somewhat analogous physical abnormality may be induced by man in other 93animals, compare the intelligent words of George Eliot in her poem, “A Minor Prophet”:—

“... milkmaids who drew milk from cows,

With udders kept abnormal for that end.”

In confirmation of which see “Report of the Committee, consisting of Mr. E. Bidwell, Professor Boyd Dawkins, and others, appointed for the purpose of preparing a Report on the Herds of Wild Cattle in Chartley Park, and other parks in Great Britain.” The Committee state, concerning a herd of wild cattle at Somerford Park, near Congleton, of which herd “the cows are all regularly milked,” that “The udders of the cows here are as large as in ordinary domestic cows, which is not the case in the herds which are not milked.”—(“Report of the British Association,” 1887, p. 141.)

XXIV.

1.—“Misread by man ...”

“You say ‘We marry our girls when they reach puberty,’ and you take as indication of that stage one only, and that the least certain, of the many changes which go to make up maturity. It is the least certain because the most variable, and dependent more upon climate and conditions of life than upon any true physical development. No one would deny that a strong country girl of thirteen was more mature physically than a girl of eleven brought up in the close, unwholesome atmosphere of a crowded city, yet you say the latter has attained to puberty, and that the former has not. Into such discrepancies has this physiological error led you. 94Without going into the domain of physiology for proof of assertion, let me draw your attention to the very practical proof of its truth, which you have in the fact well-known to you all, that girls married at this so-called period of puberty do not, as a rule, bear children till some years later, i.e., till they really approach maturity. I allow that you share this error with all but modern physiologists. Even if marriage is delayed till fourteen, where conception takes place immediately, sterility follows after; but where the girl is strong and healthy there is a lapse of three or four years before child-bearing begins, a proof that puberty had not been reached till then, although menstruation had been all the time existent. Of course there are exceptional cases, but does not the consensus of experience point to these as general truths?”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to Hindoos).

Id. “... sign of his misdeed.”

See Note XXVI., 6.

4.—“... victim to his adult rage.”

Of this, as existent to the present age, abundant direct and collateral evidence is given by a brochure entitled “A Practical View of the Age of Consent Act, for the benefit of the Mahomedan community in general, by the Committee of the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta,” published by that Society, in June, 1891, as “an accurate exposition of the object and scope of the new law, in the clearest possible language, for the benefit of the Mahomedans, 95particularly the ignorant classes, and circulated widely in the vernacular languages for that purpose.”

The following are extracts from the pamphlet:—

Par. 1. “Now that the Age of Consent Act has been passed by his Excellency the Viceroy, in Council, and as there is every likelihood of its provisions not being sufficiently well understood by the Mahomedan community in general, and by the ignorant Mahomedans in particular, owing to the use of technical legal phraseology in the drafting of the Act, it seems to the Committee of Management of the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta, to be highly desirable that the object and intention of the Government in passing this Act, as well as its scope and the manner in which it is to be administered by the Criminal Authorities, should be laid down on paper in the clearest and easiest language possible, for the information and instruction of the Mahomedan population, and particularly of such of them as are not conversant with legal technicalities.”

Par. 2. “The Committee are of opinion that such a course will be highly beneficial to members of their community, inasmuch as it will show to them distinctly what action on the part of a Mahomedan husband towards his young wife has been made, by the recent legislation, a heinous criminal offence of no less enormity than the offence of rape, and punishable with the same heavy punishment.”

Par. 3. “It is hoped that they will thereby be put on their guard against committing, or allowing the commission of an act which they have hitherto been accustomed to think lawful and innocent, but which has now been made into a heinous offence....”