Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/499

Rh life which entirely divorces the public interests of women and men is strikingly illustrated in the vicissitudes of Mohammedanism. In the Koran itself there originally existed conditions which, taken as a whole, were far more favorable to women than the common law of England. Originally, women of the Mohammedan faith were as highly educated and moved abroad as freely as men, mingling unveiled in their company, and actively participating in public affairs. Those were the centuries when the liberal and enlightened rule of Mohammedans made the name of Spain glorious, and when all Europe sought education in Mohammedan universities. It was during those centuries that the Turk passed from victory to victory, proceeding from western Asia into Europe, until his conquering army stood on the eve of a conquest of Austria.

But, as had so often happened before in warlike nations grown rich with enormous booty, women of the higher class surrendered themselves more and more to an indoor life of extravagant luxury and idleness, only too truthfully mirrored in the tales of "A Thousand and One Nights." The veil was doubtless at first worn as a sort of portable tent, into which one could withdraw to escape the bold stare of unwelcome admirers; partly as a result of a growing refinement, which led them to shun the gaze of a rude soldiery; partly to enhance their own attractiveness by affected concealment of their beauty. Thus in England also, during the warlike period of the Crusades, English women of rank habitually wore, even within doors, a veil which could be used for such purposes. And the somewhat like circumstances resulting from like causes conspired to make the English woman, likewise, at one period of her history, a creature whose dense ignorance and silliness equaled that found in the Turkish harem. The Asiatic woman, however, having once become an objet de luxe, plunged deeper into the gulf of helplessness, and has much more slowly begun to grow out of that condition. She is as one fallen into a pit, who can only escape by her own co-operation, but whose enervated arms are so weakened that every movement has become a burden. As woman is the lifestream of each race—the source which must be lifted high as the fountain is to rise—the enslavement of womanhood in Turkish harems has inevitably wrought its own revenge of terrible evil upon the nominal enslavers. Most miserable to-day is the lot of that people born of a race of slave mothers; most significantly is that debilitated empire known as "the Sick Man of Europe." Nothing but a patient upbuilding from the very foundation can restore that invalid whose disease is so deep-seated and longabiding. This upbuilding has already begun. The elixir of modern ideas has not stopped with placing novels and teaching