Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/572

554 amount of affection in woman's composition, she could by her greater force of will and character drive man into a corner of the universe, just as the inferior races of the past have been driven before the superior ones—only more so, the disparity being greater.

This is not wholesome. If men have abused their power in the past, it is only what holders of power, who were also fallible mortals, might have been expected to do; and if women were wise, the lesson they would learn, now that they are more and more being placed in the way of acquiring power themselves, would be, if possible, not to abuse it so much as men in their day have done. There is little to be gained by turning the shafts of feminine wit against men, nor will the feminine character be improved by much indulgence in the practice. Better far will be a serious effort to rise to the level of their new opportunities and responsibilities. A man may be a great scholar and a great fool, and so, we venture to say. may a woman. It is a much easier thing to stimulate the intellect than to strengthen and enrich the moral nature; and it does not follow that, because women now have access to most colleges and universities, they are going at once to show a higher type of character. It is not impossible even that a reliance on those methods of culture which have been devised for men may tend to impair in a greater or less degree those finer intuitions which are claimed as the glory of the female sex, and in which we are quite prepared to declare our own firm belief. The intellectual differences between the sexes may be less than has hitherto been supposed; but there are differences nevertheless, and it is the manifest interest of the race that these should be developed and made prominent, rather than weakened and obscured. So greatly have the claims of women been advanced within the last half generation that it seems almost like offering an indignity to her present state to quote the lines of Tennyson so greatly admired in their day:

 For woman is not undeveloped man. But diverse; could we make her as the man, Sweet love were slain."

Still, perhaps, there is wisdom in the words, and, if so, it might be well to suggest a caution lest, in the eager assertion on her part of equality in all points with man not—to say of superiority to him—something of inestimable value be, if not lost, allowed to fall into comparative disuse, with more or less of resulting injury.

If the human race is to endure, and if civilization is to advance, the relations between the sexes must not permanently be relations of rivalry. Men and women were not made to struggle with one another for the advantages of life, but mutually to aid one another in reaping those advantages. That "sweet love" of which the poet speaks is given as the reward of right relations between man and woman; and, where other guidance is lacking, we may profitably ask whether any given line of conduct tends to the gaining or the sacrificing of that reward. If to the former, then it may safely be said to be, right conduct; if to the latter, wrong. What it is clear that man has to do in these later days is to frame to himself a higher and completer ideal of manhood than he has hitherto, on the whole, entertained, and try to live up to it. The awakened womanhood of the age—when allowance has been made for all that is hysterical and morbid and heart less in contemporary feminine utterances—summons him most clearly and distinctly to walk henceforth on higher levels in the strength of a nobler self-control. Then he has to recognize in the fullest sense, without a particle of reservation, that he has in woman not a weaker shadow of himself, not a reflection of his glory nor a minister to his pleasures, but a divinely bestowed help-meet, to whom special powers and