Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/203

Rh has been brutalized by manual labor and drink. The advocates of Paris who are accustomed to plead for the workmen have remarked that the women are able to put their cases much better than their husbands, and often say to the latter, "Send me your wife."

The biological considerations we have adduced explain to us why the two sexes tend to diverge from each other as we proceed from the lower to the higher classes. Both sexes among peasants and working people having nearly the same moral and intellectual faculties, they can sympathize with each other, and have no reason for becoming estranged. It is different among the intelligent classes, where the two sexes, in consequence of the increasing pre-eminence of man, not having the same ideas, the same sentiments, nor the same tastes, can not understand each other, and form separate coteries. Moralists have long taken notice of the separation, which is of force in the family and in the meetings of men and of women, which seem to be increasing from year to year.

According to M. Le Bon's researches, the different social classes should be ranked by their cranial capacity as follows: literary and scientific men, middle-class men (bourgeois), nobles, servants, peasants. The separation of which we speak widens as we rise from the peasant to the man of science, passing the servant, the noble, and the middle-class man. It appears, then, like the pre-eminence of man over woman, to be measured proportionately to the cranial capacity and the development of intelligence.

It might be thought that the physical and intellectual inferiority of woman is a consequence of her muscles and brain being less exercised than those of man. This is not correct. As to bodily strength, it readily appears in the circus, where the two sexes receive the same physical education, that the boy is always more vigorous than the girl, and constantly maintains his superiority over her. Some difficult feats which the men perform regularly are forbidden to the women. The view that the intellectual superiority of man and inferiority of woman are due to differences in education is likewise not just. In former ages, when the mass of the people were groping in ignorance, neither sex was better instructed than the other; and now, in the France of to-day, there are still six hundred thousand children of both sexes who never set foot in a school, and receive absolutely no education. We can, then, say with Professor Bischoff, of Munich, that "women have suffered no other hindrances to the exercise and evolution of their brains and their intellect than those that are derived from their constitution and their faculties of development." The pretense that woman never receives the same education as man is, moreover, false. Female pupils receive precisely the same musical instruction at the music-schools as male pupils. How comes it then that, although there are incomparably more women than men following music as a profession, women furnish good performers but no composers? The same