her, if he does not expect her to give up her career of charming straightway, and restrict herself to cooking, sewing, and the incubating of babies; and, furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities in his wife by sheer failure in his own career, then there is a happy and virtuous marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or divorce, and the woman sometimes becomes the companion of another man without the sanction of law. But she has been, it will be perceived, a courtesan all along. And while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her comfortable qualities, she does not come in the scope of this inquiry.

But there is another figure which I wish I had been able to include. Not wishing to involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain. She is the young woman of the leisure class, whose actions, as represented to us in the yellow journals, shock or divert us, according to our temperaments. I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale, she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic excesses, how to play. And emancipation from middle-class standards of taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. "Too many cocktails," a lady averred to me the other day, "is better than smugness; risque conversation far better than none at all." And that celebrated "public-be-damned" attitude of the pseudo-aristocracy is a great moral improvement over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the neighbors which prevails in the middle class.

But, if I sympathize with the "hell raising" tendency—no other phrase describes it—of the young woman of the leisure class, I have more pity than sympathy for the one who is trying to realize the ideal of the "salon." For she must, after sad experience and bitter disillusionment, be content with the tawdry activities which, relieved by the orgiastic outbreaks alluded to above, constitute social life in America.

The establishment of a salon is, in itself, a healthful ideal. If civilization were destroyed, and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition of the salon would be a good starting point for the creation of a medium of satisfying social intercourse. Social intercourse we must have, or the best of us lapse into boorishness. The ego only properly functions in contact with other and various egos. So that, in any case, we should have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society." All the more do we need "society" at present, since those ancient institutions, the church and the café, have almost entirely lost the character of real social centers.

Recognizing this need, and supposing the best intentions in the world, what can people do at present in the creation of a "society" which shall be useful to the community instead of a laughing stock for the intelligent?

That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a little scarce—the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real trouble lies elsewhere.

The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who have too much of it, anyway. Moreover—and this is an important point—no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard. So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.

One thing will be observed with regard to these following papers—though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence, the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities as friend or leader or servant—that is Romance. It is an attitude which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for inspiration—and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and you shall be saved—so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of Browning, of George Meredith.

So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical capacity—a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.

But—I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology, which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.

But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these articles on feminism. It involves the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is, of the apparent indifference or even hostility of men toward the woman's movement. The fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the rebellious leaders of their sex, that women have always been what man wanted them to be—have changed to suit his changing ideals. The fact is, furthermore, that the woman's movement of today is but another example of that readiness of women to adapt themselves to a masculine demand.

Men are tired of subservient women; or, to speak more exactly, of the seemingly subservient woman who effects her will by stealth—the pretty slave with all the slave's subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was possible for men to imagine themselves masters, they were satisfied. But when they found out that they were dupes, they wanted a change. If only for self-protection, they desired to find in woman a comrade and an equal. In reality they desired it because it promised to be more fun.

So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. She must fight for it.

We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the