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 calledunfortunately 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! No 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

to the views and feelings entertained by intelligent Englishwomen on their own condition and requirements. On the contrary, it is the desire and ambition of women to be considered in all the relations, all the conditions of life, domestic and social, as the helpmate. We pray not to be separated from men, but to be allowed to be nearer to them; to be considered not merely as the appendage and garnish of man's outward existence, but as a part of his life, and all that is implied in the real sense of the word. We see the strong necessity in many cases, yet we do regret that the avocations of men accustom them to dispense with much of our sympathy and society, and that thus a great number of women are thrown upon their own resources, mental and social. Every circle of men from which women are excluded supposes a certain number of women separated from them. I do not find that this state of things has, hitherto, made men uncomfortable. Now, however, they seem, all at once, to be struck with it as an anomalous state, and I am glad of it; but surely it is not to be imputed to women as a fault or as an assumption. I saw the effects of this kind of social separation of the sexes when I was in America. I thought it did not act well on the happiness or the manners of either. The men too often became coarse and material as clay in private life, and in public life too prone to cudgels and revolvers; and the effect of the women herding so much together was not to refine them, but the contrary; to throw them into various absurd and unfeminine exaggerations. This at least was my impression. I confine my observations as much as possible to our own time and country, else I might enlarge on these influences, and show that in Italy, as in America, the separation of the two sexes, arising from quite different causes, is producing even worse results. It struck me in Italy that the absence of all true sympathy, a sort of disdain felt by the men for the women