In these numberless satires upon women, executed by pen and pencil, there is a certain portion of truth, for, indeed, a woman powerfully organized and fully developed, but without mental culture and devoid of the sentiment of duty, can be a creature most terrific. If the possession of wealth exempts her from labor, there are four ways in which she can appease the ennui of a barren mind and a torpid conscience. One is deep play, which was, until within seventy years, the resource chiefly relied upon by women of fashion for killing the hours between dinner and bed; one is social display, or the struggle for the leadership of a circle, an ambition perhaps more pernicious than gambling; another is intrigues of love, no longer permitted in the more advanced countries, but formerly an important element in fashionable life everywhere; finally, there is the resource of excessive and ceaseless devotion, the daily mass, the weekly confession, frequent and severe fasting, abject slavery to the ritual. Of all these, the one last named is probably the most injurious, since it tends to bring virtue itself into contempt, and repels the young from all serious and elevated modes of living. Accordingly, in studying the historic families of Europe, we frequently find that the devotee and the debauchee alternate, each producing the other, both being expressions of the same moral and mental defect. But whether a mindless woman gambles, dresses, flirts, or fasts, she is a being who furnishes the satirist with legitimate material. Equal rights, equal education, equal chances of an independent career--when women have enjoyed these for so much as a single century in any country, the foibles at which men have laughed for so many ages will probably no longer be remarked, for they are either the follies of ignorance or the vices resulting from a previous condition of servitude. Nor will men of right feeling ever regard women with the cold, critical eye of a Chesterfield or a Rochefoucauld, but rather with something of the exalted sentiment which caused old Homer, whenever he had occasion to speak of a mother, to prefix an adjective usually applicable to goddesses and queens, which we can translate best, perhaps, by our English word REVERED. CHAPTER XVI. AMONG THE CHINESE. [Illustration: Chinese Caricature of an English Foraging Party.[28] [Footnote 28: From "The Middle Kingdom," vol. ii., p. 177, by S. W. Williams, New York, 1871.]]