lock's discomfiture. It may be reckoned an ingenious one, though an ardent admirer of Shakespeare has spoken of it as a sorry quibble.' Still, it was clearly necessary in order that Portia's woman's wit should triumph. Also, that the story should end gaily instead of striking a note of tragedy at its conclusion. But to some minds-probably ill-regulated ones-there is an interest in considering the possible other side of the question. In short, the might have beens.'

Supposing, therefore, Shylock had elected to claim his pound of flesh at all costs? True, the penalties were severe: confiscation of life and property. But he is represented by the hand that drew him as savage enough to push matters to the bitter end, as many from similar motives of racial hatred have done both before his time and since.

The illustration is a simple one. Are women, in the mad pursuit of their pound of flesh in which we see them engaged at this moment, bringing upon themselves-by natural laws higher and more universal in their bearing than any of the most puissant state of Venice-pains and penalties, such as should do well to make them pause in their wild career?

To prove my point-namely, that women would lose infinitely more than they gain by parliamentary enfranchisement-I should like to make a few remarks on woman's position, as illustrated by those who support these pretensions and those who are opposed to their being granted.

To begin with the latter it is generally urged, with perhaps a certain amount of truth, that women are incapacitated by natural reasons-such as inferior brain capacity, indifference to the larger questions of policy, as apart from the men who support them—from taking an active part in the government of their country such as the possession of a vote would confer upon them. This view of the question, an essentially masculine one, seems to me open to objection. It is a cheap form of masculine wit to generalise about women in a way that would certainly be looked upon as childish in the extreme if the same words (and arguments) were used with regard to men. And because there has been hitherto no female Homer, Michael Angelo, or Shakespeare seems no reason, in itself, for excluding her from parliamentary franchise. Still an unbiassed mind may admit a grain of truth in a bushel of chaff. And that there is a grain of truth in the assertion commonly made with regard to women that they are not, by nature, politicians would be generally admitted. The stock proof of this is that a number of women meeting together, whether at a tea party or at any other strictly feminine gathering, rarely discuss politics in any class of life. Again, the political situation is probably not the first subject to which she turns in reading the news of the day. A man on his way to business buys a newspaper, and studies the state of the markets, the sporting column, or politics. A woman

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in a similar situation, unless she is personally interested in the success of some man, or in some measure by which she or he is personally affected, reads the fashions, the literary column, or the gossip of the day. With a woman in the immeasurably larger number of casesso large, in fact, that the exception may be taken as a negligible quantity-it is alleged measures mean a man.

The objection that could be taken to the above assertions is one that I venture to think has not so far met with the recognition it deserves, and that is the power women have of adaptability to new surroundings and conditions.

Woman's talents generally take a practical direction. As a rule her soul abhors the abstract as much as nature is said to abhor a vacuum; but give her the concrete, a vote by which she can back up a friend or wreak vengeance on a foe, and she will spare no pains to master the subject, and cast all aside in order to throw herself into the fray, and take and give blows with the best of the combatants.

The problem before us seems to me, therefore, to turn not so much upon whether women are capable of making the best use of the franchise, as to whether the advantage they, and humanity in general, would derive from it would be at all commensurate with certain and inevitable loss.

Is it possible that the sober-minded philosopher of either sex can look with light-hearted approval on a revolution of which it is impossible to estimate the far-reaching consequences, but which, to put it at the lowest computation, must alter the existing conditions and relations of the sexes in this country to a very considerable extent ?

For hitherto man has had it all his own way in the active domain of politics. Woman has used her influence; she has pulled the strings, but she has kept aloof from the stage. Is this as it should be, or is it a wrong which those who wish her well should lose no time in redressing? To answer this it would be as well to take man's view of his vocation in life, and we will do so in the words of a master of wordcraft, Lord Morley of Blackburn.

Speaking of Gladstone at the termination of his University career he says: The end of it all, as Aristotle said it should be, was not knowing but doing, honourable desire of success, satisfaction of the hopes of friends, a general literary appetite, conscious preparation for private and public duty in the world, a steady progression out of the shallows into the depths, a gaze beyond garden and cloister in agmen, in pulverem, in clamorem, to the dust, and burning sun, and shouting of the days of conflict.'

Action therefore, the joining in the fray, the giving and taking of blows, is the natural outcome of the years of preparation that go to form a man's character and mind in early life, and is the end and object of them. That it is not so with all may be readily conceded. But man at his best is essentially a man of action; and nations share

this characteristic with the individual. Rome in its decadence was not without its galaxy of brilliant minds. Letters and the fine arts flourished, but man was plunged in luxury; he became effete; woman shared his degradation, and the home which should have been a centre of purity and peace was a plague spot on the earth, and Rome

fell.

Let us take a companion picture to Morley's from Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.

We are foolish [he says] and without excuse foolish in speaking of the 'superiority' of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

Now the separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest wherever war is just, wherever conquest is necessary. But woman's power is for rule, not for battle--and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the quality of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office and place she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man in his rough work in the open world must encounter all peril and trial; to him therefore must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error. Often he must be wounded or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home-it is the place of peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, or division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by household gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love-as far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and light, shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy seasso far it vindicates the name, and fulfils the praise of home. And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her.

In claiming Ruskin as a witness to what I have called the oldfashioned-and perhaps for the moment the unpopular-side of the controversy now raging, it may be allowed, at least, that I have sought support from one who has never ceased proclaiming from the housetops his belief in woman and her high destiny. Never has Ruskin lost an opportunity of avowing his admiration for her gifts, her mission, and her power, provided she follows those well-indicated paths in which nature, and the common-sense of mankind (and by mankind her own sex should be included), has hitherto held her restrained.

That these restraints are only restraints in the sense that the policeman is one to the evil-doer who wishes to break laws imposed for the benefit of society generally, is a position which in the present heated state of feminine public opinion would probably be strongly contested. Nevertheless I believe it is one which a plebiscite of the women of Great Britain and Ireland would endorse. For can any doubt exist as to the true ideal of the relations between the sexes, in theory at least if not in practice? Is it not that the interests and aspirations of man and woman should be identical, so that they should labour hand-in-hand, the one contributing what the other lacked, in the great work of social regeneration? And if in practice this ideal is seldom reached, is it not because living in an imperfect world there is in this as in all other things a wide divergence between aspiration and performance? What can we say therefore when we hear and see daily these divergences emphasised, the antagonisms between the sexes brought out in fullest and most repulsive form— women struggling with men, and opposing force to force-except that it is a sight to make angels weep? The murderer does not commit a greater crime, for this is death to the ideal. It has been frequently said, not by women only, that man owes what is best in him to woman. Who can estimate the share she has in his life? It is the deeper for being for the most part hidden, and if a woman is sometimes the cause of a man's undoing, still more often it is a woman's influence—a wife's possibly or a mother's-which recalls him when wandering in forbidden or dangerous paths, and holds before him the unswerving standard of her own faith and purity of life. Burke, in eloquent words which still ring in our ears, lamented that the days of chivalry were over. He was wrong! They will never die as long as a true man and a true woman remain in the world. But could anything be more fatal to that sentiment-call it what you will, chivalry or reverence for the sex-than that woman should leave her own sphere, in which, whatever her rank in life, she reigns supreme, and descend from her pedestal to enter into competition with the other sex on subjects for which she has no special aptitude or gift, on occasions when every man would wish her out of the way?

That the law of this country is capable of improvement with regard to women's just rights and aspirations no man or woman would be disposed to deny. Much has been done already, more remains to be done. But that the present state of things requires a revolution, such as the enfranchisement of the sex, in order to right their wrongs, is an idea which it seems only necessary to put into plain language in order to see its folly. Surely the remedy is out of all proportion to the disease.

In the past women have had their wrongs, and in few have they been greater than in the case of their education. On this point something still remains to be done. If we look back, however, on the

past hundred years, and note the progress that has already been made, there can be no cause for fear that this progress will not continue, with an even accelerated pace, in the future. For to education, and to the development of the Christian ideal of love and self-sacrifice, we can trust more than to any other cause for the growth of 'feminism' in the right direction-that is, of a greater appreciation of woman's dignity and aspirations, and a greater realisation of the enormous field of activities open to her under the natural conditions of her being.

It has been well said by a clever writer who has taken up strongly the cause of woman's higher education in America 1:

Let us not be so dull as to ignore the gifts of woman. Let us not be of those who still doubt whether it is not better that she should be a simpleton; who think that only superficially educated women can make good wives and mothers. If, as Goethe says, it is a most frightful thing to see ignorance at work, is it not most frightful when the work is that which woman is called to do in the home and in the school? In all companionship the lower tends to pull the higher down, for it is easy to sink and hard to rise. Hence an ignorant mother will dull the minds of husband and children, while one who is intelligent and appreciative will be for them a strong stimulus to self-activity. It is the nature of an enlightened mind to diffuse light, of a generous soul to make love prevail, of a noble character to build character. . . . In marriage, as in friendship, as in every other sphere of life, human relations are chiefly spiritual, and the more thoroughly educated a woman is the more able is she to fulfil in a noble way the duties of wife and mother.

The primary aim, however, is not to make a good wife and mother any more than it is to make a good husband and father. The educational ideal is human perfection—perfect manhood and perfect womanhood. Given the right kind of man or woman, and whatever duties are to be performed, whatever functions are to be fulfilled, will be well-performed and well-fulfilled. Woman's sphere lies wherever she can live nobly and do useful work.2

These striking words, which it would be well if some in the present excited state of public opinion would inwardly ponder on and digest, dispose in a remarkable way of the argument, frequently used, that wives and mothers have opportunities denied to the unmarried of influencing public opinion indirectly, and so forth. Does the woman exist who is so isolated by circumstances, so cut off from contact with others, that she may not become, in any walk of life, either a centre of life and light to others, or the reverse?

From one point of view only-and there are others too numerous to mention the education and training of the youth of both sexes, what a huge field is open to woman's influence and activities!

It is said that Huxley was asked which, in his opinion, were the most important years for the formation of character in the life of a human being. His answer was: Probably the first three years of a child's life.' And these three years are given over by universal consent to women. That these sacred duties are little understood and even grievously neglected (from the ethical point of view) by many, in all 1 Bishop Spalding.

2

Opportunity and other Essays.