in using her prerogatives first as if they were deficiencies, and then in employing them to offset man’s deficiencies. Man is a timorous, self-distrustful creature, who would never have discovered his powers if not stimulated by woman’s weakness. Probably prehistoric woman voluntarily gave up her own muscle in order that man might develop his by serving her. It is only recently that we have dared to be as athletic as we might, and the effort is still tentative enough to be relinquished if we notice any resulting deterioration, muscular or moral, in men. Women, conscious how they hold men’s welfare in their hands, simply do not dare to discover how strong they might be if they tried, because they have so far used their physical weakness not only as a means of arousing men’s good activities, but also as a means of turning to nobler directions their bad ones. Men are naturally acquisitive, impelled to work for gain and gold, gain and more gain, gold and more gold. Unable to deter them from this impulse, we turn it to an unselfish end, that is, we let men support us, preserving for their sakes the fiction that we are too frail to support ourselves. If they had neither child nor wife, men would still be rolling up wealth, but it is very much better for their characters that they should suppose they are working for their families rather than for themselves. We might be Amazons, but for men’s own sakes we refrain from what would be for ourselves a selfish indulgence in vigor. Man is not only naturally acquisitive but is naturally ostentatious of his acquisitions. Having bled for his baubles, he wishes to put them on and strut in them. Again we step in and redirect his impulse; we put on his baubles and strut for him. We let him think that our delicate physique is better fitted for jewels and silk than his sturdier frame, and that our complex service to the Society which must be established to show off his jewels and silk, is really a lighter task than his simple slavery to an office desk. How reluctantly men have delegated to women dress and all its concomitant luxury may readily be proved by an examination of historic portraits—behold Raleigh in all his ruffles!—and by the tendency to top-hat and tin-can decoration exhibited by the male savage. The passionate attention given by our own household males to those few articles of apparel in which we have thought it safe to allow them individual choice, unregulated by requirements of uniform, articles such as socks or cravats, must prove even to men themselves how much safer it is that their clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed, that women should do their dressing for them.

Not only for the moral advantages gained by men in supporting us do women preserve the fallacy of physical feebleness, but also for the spiritual exaltation men may enjoy by protecting us and rescuing us from perils. For this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the man should think the peril real, but it is absolutely necessary that he should think the woman thinks it real. It does a man more good to save a woman from a mouse than from a tiger, as contributing more to the sense of superiority so necessary to him. The truth is that women are not really afraid of anything, but they perceive how much splendid incentive would be lost to the world if they did not pretend to be. For example, if women were actually afraid of serpents, would the Tempter have chosen that form just when he wished to be most ingratiating? But think how many heroes would be unmade if women should let men know that they are perfectly capable of killing their own snakes. The universality of the mouse fear proves its prehistoric origin, showing how consistently and successfully women have been educating men in heroism; in earliest times it probably required a whole dinotherium ramping at the cave-mouth to induce primitive man to draw weapon in his mate’s defense, but now to evoke the quintessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is to hop on a chair at sight of a mouse.

Woman’s motive for suppressing her intellectual powers is exactly the same as her motive for not developing her physical powers. She is ready to enjoy and to employ her own genius in secret for the sake of the free and open growth of man’s. She has wrought so conscientiously to this end that it is probable that the average man’s belief in woman’s mental inferiority is even stronger than his belief in her physical inferiority, for well woman has perceived the peril to man of his ever discovering the truth of her intellectual endowment. Man’s energy cannot survive the strain of thinking his brain inferior, or even equal, to a woman’s. This fact is the reason why women so long renounced all educational advantages; that at last their minds were too much for them, and that they were driven by pure ebullience of suppressed genius to invade the university, will more and more be seen by women to have been a regrettable mistake. There is much current newspaper discussion of the failure of the men’s colleges to-day to educate the young male, his utter obduracy before stimulus is despairingly compared with the effect of college upon the youth of past generations. I fear that the reason is simple to seek: men’s colleges have deteriorated exactly in the ratio that women’s colleges have improved. The course for women and women’s colleges is therefore clear.

Our history shows that we have, with only occasional lapses into genius, nobly sustained the requirements of our unselfishness. On rare occasions our ability has been so irresistible, and our honesty so irrepressible, that in an unguarded moment we have tossed off a Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa Bonheur, a Madame Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for the most part we have preserved a glorious mediocrity that allows man to believe himself dominant in administration, art, science, war, and finance. The women who have so far forgotten themselves as almost to betray woman’s genius to the world, are fortunately for the moral purpose of the sex, exceptional, and the average woman makes a very creditable concealment of intellect. I am hopeful that as women grow in wisdom, their outbreaks of ability will be more and more controlled and sporadic, and man’s paralysis before them be correspondingly infrequent, so that at some future day, we may see woman again relinquish all educational privileges, and become wisely illiterate for man’s sake.

Our own intellectual advantages are as much greater than man’s as they are more secret. No woman would put up with the clumsiness and crudity of a man’s brain, knowing so well the superexcellence of her own, in the delicacy of its machinery, the subtle science required in its employment, the absorbing interest of the material on which it is employed, and the noble purpose to which it is solely devoted.

As to our mental mechanism, it is so much finer than man’s that, out of pure pity for his clogging equipment, we let him think logic and reason better means of traveling from premise to conclusion than the air flights we encourage him to scorn as woman’s intuition. Nothing is more painful to a woman than an argument with a man, because he journeys from given fact to deduced truth by pack-mule, and she by aeroplane. When he finds her at the destination, he is so irritated by the swiftness of her passage that he accuses her of not having followed the right direction, and demands as proof that she describe the weeds by the roadside, which he has amply studied,—he calls this study his reasoning process. Of course no woman stops to botanize when the object is to get there. No man ever wants to be a woman? No man ever longs to exchange his ass for our airship? No man ever envies us the nimbleness by which we can elude logic and get at truth?

Our mental operations are keyed to the very sublimation of delicacy and rapidity, and they need to be, considering the subtleties of the skill with which we must