Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/401

Rh that pleases her is, during the time she lives in it, her adopted country. The thought never occurs to her that she may be ridiculous or may appear so; or that a woman can be ridiculous or a man think it of her. Such is the confidence, justified by experience, which the privileges of her sex give her, that she has neither timorous reserve nor sickly timidity. Homage paid to her as a woman does not embarrass her, attention does not disconcert her. She is accustomed to them, and freely confesses the pleasure they cause her.

She is the resultant of a mode of education, of a kind of life that differs profoundly from ours. She has been taught to rely upon herself, to judge for herself. In her relations with men she has always been free but responsible, guardian of her own honor, and artisan of her future. She has seen and observed; she is not ignorant of the duties of life, or of the perils of independence. If the objection is made that this too premature knowledge is often liable to render her under a brilliant and sportive exterior coldly calculating and too early cautious, we may answer that she will sooner or later have to deduce her own conclusions from what surrounds her, of the world in which she lives, and that it may be better for her eyes to be opened to evidence and her judgment to be formed before making the decisive choice of her life.

It is hard in examining such a question to abstract one's self sufficiently from the usages and the ideas of the medium in which one lives—to be absolutely impartial. By instinct we are inclined toward accepted ideas, usual customs, and current axioms. Our own ideas are still too far away from those of the people across the sea for strong contradictions not to arise between them. In such a matter experience only is of value, and we can judge equitably only by results. Here experience is conclusive and the results are satisfactory.

If the American Union is to-day one of the first countries in the world, it owes the fact to a large extent to the American woman, who was and still is an important factor in its astonishing prosperity. The United States owes it to her that it has preserved the religious faith, the principle of vitality, imported by the Pilgrim fathers to the American shores. She has been the efficacious artisan of the work. She has maintained it, extended and enlarged it in the church and the school. In hours of difficulty, as during the war of independence and the war of secession, the patriotism of the woman sustained the courage of the man. Under all circumstances she was his companion and his equal. As such he respected her, and that respect which she inspired in him by her self-denial and her courage in the beginning, by her intelligence and good breeding afterward, by her charms and her confidence in his protection, has fashioned American manners, and has strongly