tender, reverent, and protective towards a good mother, with an affectionate yet somewhat exacting and patronising feeling towards a good sister (if they are so happy as to have either one or the other), as regards women generally, they enter on manhood and its duties with a total inability to understand, or rather an inclination to misunderstand and despise, the motives which actuate us. It has become the established creed with men that women have only one object-to obtain their love; and only one aim in life-to be married; and if we show a contempt for these vulgar notions, it is attributed either to the hypocrisy of weak-minded, or the presumption of strongminded, women. To this ignorance, and not to poorness of spirit and a bad heart, I attribute the sneering tone which has prevailed of late in one or two of our popular reviews, I have seen it with deep pain, knowing, what certainly the clever men who write these reviews cannot be aware of, the injurious effect, the deep-lying, incalculable evil they may produce. It is the natural instinct of woman to look up to man, to desire his approbation, to earn his esteem, to be worthy of his friendship, though she may not obtain his love, nor need his protection. In former days women did not usually read the satires written by men against our sex; they were too gross-in some instances too atrocious even for men to endure, unless recommended by their classical latinity to the study of our school-boys, or those who instruct our school-boys: but reviews and journals are now a part of the reading of all well-educated people; they lie on every drawing-room table. A woman takes up one of these able periodicals, expecting to find instruction, moral sustenance, religious guidance. Possibly she lights upon some article, written, not in Latin, but in choice and vigorous English, by one of those many clever young writers who, it is said, have come to a determination " to put down women." Here she finds her honest endeavours to raise

her position in life, or to reclaim her fallen sisters, traduced and ridiculed. She perceives that these gentlemanly adversaries do not argue the question of right or wrong, they simply use a power for a purpose. She sees the wit and ability she admires, the superior power to which she would willingly look up for help, here turned against her; the privilege of working out good in any path but that which obsolete custom has prescribed to her is positively refused. If her success in any such path be undeniable, it is acknowledged in an insolently complimentary style as an exceptional case; while the mistakes or failures of certain women are singled out as a theme of the bitterest ridicule, and visited upon all. Well! the woman who reads this wellwritten, brilliant, "unanswerable" article is perhaps at the very time working hard with all the power God has given her, trained by such means as society has provided for her, to gain her daily bread, to assist her struggling family; perhaps she may be sustaining an indigent father, or paying the college debts, or supporting the unacknowledged children, of a dissipated brother (we have known such cases, though we do not speak of them). She reads, and the words, winged by eloquence and envenomed by a cynical impertinence, sink into her heart, and leave an ulcer there. It is not the facts or the truths which offend, it is the vulgar flippant tone, the slighting allusion, the heartless "jocosity"-to borrow one of their own words-with which men, gentlemanly, accomplished, otherwise generous and honourable men, can sport with what is most sacred in a woman's life-most terrible in a woman's fate. Those who say to us, "Help yourselves!" might say in this case, "Retort is easy!" It is so-too easy! Suppose a woman were to take up the pen and write a review, headed in capital letters," MEN in the 19th Century!" and pointing to absurd mistakes in legislation; to the want of public spirit in public men; to fraudulent bankruptcies; to mad or

credulous speculations with borrowed gold—to social evils of the masculine gender corrupting the homes of others, and polluting their own, and wind up the philippic with "Of such are our pastors and our masters?" Or respond to an article on "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," by an article headed "Silly Novels by Gentlemen Novelists?" True! this might be done-but God forbid that it ever should be done!-God forbid that women should ever enter an arena of contest in which victory, were it possible, would be destruction! The aggravating words of angry women never did any good, written or spoken; and of all things we could look to for help, recrimination were the most foolish and the most fatal. If men can sport with that part of the social happiness and virtue which has been entrusted to them, it is bad enough; but I trust in God that no woman will ever profane the sanctities of life left in her keeping by retorting scorn with scorn, or avenging license by license, for that were not merely to deface the social edifice, but to pull it down upon our heads.

Meantime, those who look on cannot but see that here is a mischief done which men have not calculated, and which women cannot avert. It is still worse when these accomplished writers stoop to a mode of attack which allows of no possible retort, and insinuate imputations which no woman can hear without shrinking, and against which self-defence is ignominious. Now, as formerly, reviewers perfectly understand this; "but," men say, "if women will expose themselves to these attacks, they must endure them; so then, we may depend on man's protection" only so long as we do not need it? I have known a lady who, bent on some mission of mercy, ventured, at an unusual hour, to pass through Oxfordstreet, and was grossly insulted by a gentleman who mistook her calling: but then, "why did she expose herself to such an accident?" Why?—because there are

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cases in which a woman must do the duty that lies before her even at the risk of a derisive satire or a cowardly insult; just as there are occasions when a man must march straight forward, though he knows he will be shot at from behind a hedge.

I confess that I see in these things grave matter for apprehension. A laugh rings loud in the reading-room of a fashionable club, and meantime there springs up in the minds of intellectual and thoughtful women, high-born and high-hearted, a spirit of silent antagonism far more dangerous than any industrial competition in the working classes.

But there is another cause which might increase this silent social antagonism between men and women, a deep, a terrible, a growing cause, which I touch on with reluctance, but it must be done. We women find ourselves openly called upon in eloquent newspaper articles, in speeches at public meetings, in sermons preached by bishops and zealous clergymen, to assist in stemming that tide of profligacy which is the disgrace of our civilisation; the consequences of which are not merely to lower the moral standard of the two sexes in regard to each other,— though that were fatal enough, but something worse; more immediate, more positive in its results.

A man returning home at evening from his daily avocations, passes through our streets, infested at that hour by sin, by temptation, by contamination, in the most revolting form,—it is the form of women, foul, tawdry, drunken, bold, and reckless. To question the "expediency " of this "institution" (as I have heard it called unfortunately not like slavery, a peculiar "institution") does not come across his mind, but he thinks it might be "better managed;" and he returns to the guarded precincts of his home with a more trembling anxiety for its dear and innocent inmates, with a vow to protect them

not only from such pollution, but even from the knowledge of it, and with vague intentions of subscribing to the neighbouring "Refuge," or to the "Society for the protection of young females." Meantime, are his feelings towards woman-kind in general, of added faith, or reverence, or tenderness? are they not rather of terror, of disgust, of scorn, enhanced, scarcely softened, by some touch of selfaccusing pity? And then, on the other hand, women brought up in the most refined habits, and appealed to by their spiritual guides, are eager to take in hand the fallen of their sex; to help to endow refuges, to visit penitentiaries. Can a woman of this class, tenderly nurtured, pure in the inmost folds of her heart, become familiar with spectacles of vice, or surmise anything of the habitual lives of the degraded and disordered creatures to whom she ministers, without misgivings sad and terrible? She always knew, in a dim sort of way, that certain immunities are claimed by your sex, and to be conceded by ours; - allowances made for example, temptation, custom, and so forth. But the price paid for these immunities she never knew before; and she breaks her heart, not so much over the victims of her own sex, as over the abasement of her idol and the destruction of her faith. If it be as she is told it is an absolute necessity in a Christian community that there should exist a class of women set apart for sacrifice, that every year some thousands of young girls should be consigned to the den of the Minotaur on the plea of public safety, no wonder that womankind should sink low in the sight of man, and manhood in the estimation of woman! wonder that when men and women meet together, even for works of social good, people should talk of the "religious habit" as the only safeguard! or that if associated together in the most innocent and elevating pursuits in academies of art, for instance-we should find on

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