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15 must be kept up by effort similar to that which created it or it will be lost for ever to us as it seems now to be lost to the women of India, of Greece, of Rome, of Gaul, of Germany, of England, who can be proved to have once possessed it proportionally with ourselves, and from the same causes,—the virtue and high spirit of the primitive maidens and wives of each nation. As they emerged from barbarism into civilization, however, all of them in turn have made the fatal mistake of trying to fashion themselves after the wayward masculine fancy, instead of striving to be true to the eternal feminine ideal, and hence in the end they have largely become but slaves and panders to masculine passion. God gave unto woman grace and fascination wherewith to allure man, her natural enemy, into her homage and allegiance, but these alone cannot suffice to keep him there. Feeble and suffering as she often is, for this the very highest qualities of human and of feminine nature are necessary; and there is now too much in the lives of American women that is false both to God and to womanhood to cause any surprise should men waver in their loyalty. That they are thus wavering, the unrebuked and increasing immorality of the young men, their selfish luxury, their later marriages, the thinly veiled sarcasms of the press, the licentious spectacles of the stage, all proclaim loudly enough. The English club-house, stronghold of intensest egotism, built of women's hearts and cemented with their tears,—the living tomb of love,—is beginning to rise against us all over the land; so that, utterly excluded as we are from their business and their politics, men may shut us out also from their pleasures and their society, and even from their hearts,—for club-men, as is well known, easily dispense with matrimony. In short, all the signs of the time are against us, and the question simply is, shall we float blindly down the current of unearned luxury and busy idleness, as our Asiatic and European sisters have done, until we find ourselves, like them, valued principally for our bodies? or shall we determine by earnest effort to keep at least the relative