Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/315

Rh the lower traits of character, the force in the one case being superior strength combined with power of will, and, in the other, superior beauty with the desire to fascinate. As these influences are gradually losing their power of despotic sway, woman, in place of acting as the slave, the toy, or the tyrant of man, is becoming not only his companion, but the custodian of the moral and religious interests of society, man looking at her as the natural critic and judge of the moral aspects of his conduct.

While the varying characteristics of the two sexes are thus seen to be inherent and inevitable (the secondary sexual characters having largely grown out of those which are primary and essential), it does not follow that they are necessarily indicative of the "sphere" of each for all time. While it is doubtless true, in a certain sense, that "that which has been is that which shall be," nevertheless, change (in accordance with law) underlies the very idea of evolution, and as it has been and is now, so it ever shall be, that the sphere of woman will be determined by the kind and degree of development to which she shall attain. Like man, she need know no other limitation; but when we look around upon the great industries of life, mining, engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and the rest, and consider how little direct agency woman has had in bringing them to their present stage of progress, we are compelled to believe that she must not look toward direct competition with man for the best unfolding of her powers, but, rather, while continuing to supplement him, as he does her, in the varied interests of their common life, that her future progress, as in the past, will consist mainly in the development of a higher character of womanhood through the selection and consequent intension of those traits peculiar to her own sex.



VERYBODY remembers Mopes, the "slothful, unsavory, nasty reversal of the laws of human nature"—Dickens's famous character of "Tom Tiddler's Ground." The recent death of the original of that sketch has attracted fresh notice to his strange mode of life. I propose to consider the question of his insanity; and whether, if insane, the mental disorder in this and similar cases calls for interference with the individual's liberty.

Mr. James Lucas, the fourth child of an opulent London merchant, was born in 1813; there were five children in all, of whom a brother and sister survive. He had an aunt who, like himself, exhibited a contempt for the ordinary decencies of civilized life, and an uncle who 