But when I see what some American women can do in public life, outside of the beautiful sphere in which they were intended to reign supreme, I feel ready to appreciate and echo the remark that Frederick the Great was wont to make when he met a woman alone in the streets of Berlin:

"What are you doing here? Go home and look after your house and your children."

MAX O'RELL.

II.

I HAVE sat silent at my table and heard foreign guests discuss, in a sweet way they have, the unpleasant points of American character, feeling that the obligations of hospitality and of good manners forbade reproof. But when we are put to open shame in print, the situation is somewhat changed. Still, it would be scarcely worth while to attempt answering the thin tissue of wrong conclusions found in Mr. Max O'Rell's witty, if rather incoherent, little article, if it were not-we will not say, for the old adage that a certain ugly thing can go round the world while the truth is drawing on its boots-but for the fact that his good-natured epigram may impress the superficial reader more strongly than it warrants.

In the first paragraph of this little chat of his, Mr. O'Rell assumes the incorrect postulate that the women of this country wish to govern. He mistakes; they wish only the liberty to govern themselves and their own interests. He then makes the extraordinary assertion that wherever women have had the chance to govern they have developed a tyranny. Is it then possible that where men govern tyranny is unknown? The women who are cited in chief support of the statement governed a single year, it appears; but for how many thousands of years have not men governed, with perpetual revolt against their tyranny? And are there not still some tolerably despotic examples extant ?

In continuing this line of remark our excursive visitor takes occasion to declare that it is the raison d'être of a woman to be a mother; but he forgets to state that then also it is the raison d'être of a man to be a father; which clears the equation of both members and leaves room for the development of the other affairs of life, perhaps opens the way for surprise that a woman

who is petted and "literally covered with precious stones," should not be entirely satisfied, should not rest content as Fido with 'his gold collar, his silk cushion, his dish of cream, but should still see some errors to be corrected, and should try to make the way easier for those who are not petted and covered with precious stones. Woman, Mr. O'Rell further says, has a grievance against nature, "which made her different from man." The conceit of it! Ah, and the civility of it!

But really it is Mr. O'Rell himself who has a grievance. And his grievance seems to be that it is difficult in some parts of this country to obtain wine and beer at open tables, which he lays to the account of the exertions of some women and not at all to those of any men. And this reveals the raison d'être of his article, which-partly veiled by the slight rankle of an old hostility to the Anglo-Saxon, and by persiflage concerning women, who in one breath are called restless, bumptious, ugly, and dissatisfied, and, in another, bright, interesting, and the superiors of their husbands "in education and in almost every respect,"is really that of a temperance tract.

Owing to the circumstance that, whether wisely or unwisely, certain women are interested in affairs public if petty, and in addition think it of less moment that he should walk a mile to make his purchase than that a whole generation of boys should be hindered in growth and stupefied in brain, Mr. O'Rell opens on them the vials of his merry wrath, and announces that they all belong to the lower middle class. As one reads, one remembers the exclamation of the young woman to another swift traveller, "What very poor letters of introduction you must have brought !" But it is a gratuitous assumption on the visitor's part. For the first principles of this government make a lower middle class here an impossibility. We do not recognize such a thing. Our government stands upon the will of the mass of the people. Education is within the reach of all. Those who have much property are unlikely to have an education superior to that of those who have little; and we have no other rank than that of education and morality. This is our theory, and we consider anything else unsound, ignoble, and unchristian. Owing to the absence of rights of primogeniture among us, money is too fluctuating an element to succeed in making and perpetuating classes. And although there must always be individual differences and

preferences, yet our women, active in public ways, are as well born and as well bred as those who are not active, and the men who accompany them are their mates in parentage, discretion, and culture.

It is " a sort of principle," Mr. O'Rell says, that the temperance women and the teetotalers are not to be found in refined society. Such a statement shows the folly of accepting evidence on hearsay, of judging from scattered instances, of taking short tours through an immense empire and supposing one's self, however brilliant and kindly and observing-and in candor Mr. O'Rell is all this-able to become sufficiently acquainted with the varieties of type, to generalize from them and arrive at correct results. Mr. O'Rell may return and say without contradiction to his own country-people whatever he chooses, but he should not say to Americans, who know better, that the woman interested in affairs here is fanatic, sour, sallow, thin, wrinkled, unmarried or disappointed in marriage; or that the woman with her children's arms about her neck finds no incentive to improve the world before they shall go out into it, and to help remove the pitfalls where others have already fallen by the way.

In truth no more complete misstatement could be made than that involved in this "sort of principle." Frances Willard, as attractive now, when she is the "uncrowned queen" of a million followers, as when she was a blooming girl, is the welcome guest of drawing-rooms where the most delicate and cultivated women are proud and glad to meet her. And there is certainly no woman in the world commanding more refined society than Lady Henry Somerset, the daughter of a hundred earls, few lovelier in person and in nature, as earnest in the temperance movement here as in the other Anglo-Saxon stronghold. I mention these prominent names to avoid enumeration of others almost as well known.

Mr. O'Rell is behind the age in America. Time was when "the long-haired man and the short-haired woman" were pierced by the arrows of the scornful; but they set on foot and accomplished the greatest reform ever wrought in the history of humanity. Now they, and the fashion of them, have gone by. And it is not necessary to tell those that meet them every day, on the street, in the office, the shop, the college, the hospital, the settlement house, that the greater part of the

women who are now taking their place as equal factors of life, of civilization, and of the welfare of the world, are young, well groomed, dressed in the best modes Paris sends us, neglecting none of the duties and none of the delicacies of manners and of living, agreeable, often beautiful, often married, with happy homes perfectly kept, with tender husbands of a nobler sort than they who hold a woman as their plaything and personal property, with dear children whose rosy health attests their care and whose future is their chief concern ; when unmarried, remaining single for the same good reason that many men give-because they choose to do so; and, when by chance no longer young, as beautiful and as fine as Mrs. Julia Ward Howe herself. Such women can well afford to dispense with the admiration of one who declares, "Ah! how I remember admiring" the man who said, "We drinks what we likes, and we don't care a for nobody!" And such women will decline to accept the smooth and pretty veneer of flattery with which Mr. O'Rell announces that the "American women of good society are probably the most intelligent, bright, and brilliant, and certainly the best educated and the most interesting, women in the world." For they know that there are women of other races all their equals, that the English woman is as well educated, that there is none more interesting than the polished Italian, the Spanish, the German, the Russian, and nowhere any more brilliant than the French woman, after whose sparkle they labor in vain.

H. P. SPOFford.

III.

THE request to comment upon Mr. O'Rell's article came to me immediately upon my return from a trip to the Orient; and the women of the East in all their degradation stood before my eyes. I seemed again to see their covered faces. In some instances one can distinguish those of them who are married from those who are unmarried, for the former are all in black. It seemed to be very appropriate that these should be dressed in mourning. They were mere beasts of burden; of not as much worth as the donkeys their husbands rode, while they walked ! The piercing cry of a Mohammedan mother, as she saw her baby carried to the burial, sounded still in my ears. Her husband and

all the men could enter the mosque, but she must remain without! And I cannot rid myself of the impression that the position of the Western woman will in some way in the future affect the position of her Eastern sisters. The light that comes to us Western women may some day dispel their darkness.

me.

If all that Mr. O'Rell says of the American woman is true, I do not wonder at her unrest. "Petted by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in the world, she is literally covered with precious stones. She is the superior of her husband in education and almost in every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions, yet she is not satisfied." If she were satisfied, she would be fit only for a harem. The "not being satisfied," of which the writer complains in the Western woman, only proves to my mind that she has a soul. She cares for the less-favored women who are not adorned or covered with jewels. As I write, the face of one of the richest young women of this country comes up before We were driving over a part of her great estate and talking on this very subject. I was conservative and spoke of my fears. Her look more than her words told me she was taking in a wider view than I had yet seen. She said: "If such great responsibilities had not been laid on me, I might not feel as I do, but I must act on my deepest convictions." As I think of her face, how I rejoice that it is not with her as with the women of the East who are covered with jewels, who look out of windows so arranged that they can see the great world without being seen by it, or being permitted to influence it! Ah! in the latter part of this nineteenth century, here in the United States, and in Great Britain, covering a woman with precious stones does not answer her nobler needs. She must work to make this world holier. To receive from God and to give out to one's fellows is the only way in which women as well as men can be made happy.

As to the happy wife and mother we are told to look at this picture: "See her lips bearing the imprints of holy kisses, and her neck the marks of the little children's arms." I knowwomen too well to believe that the babies will be neglected, and I know all about the little arms around a mother's neck. But is a mother's interest in what concerns her children to end with their nursery days? Any problem that touches the home concerns her, and it is her duty to take personal interest in it. VOL. CLXIII.-NO. 476. 8