a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein. Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves nothing about women, but it proves a good deal about the effect that their subjection has had on the minds of men. It is a significant fact that both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and that in their day the status of women was lower in Germany than in any other important country of the Western World, except Italy. The corruption of both sexes that results from the subjection of one, has been too convincingly dealt with by other writers to need discussion here. What I should like to emphasize is the futility of approaching the so-called “woman question” with any sort of pre-conceived notion concerning the nature of woman, or her sphere, or her duty to the State or to Society; and above all, of approaching it with the idea--the idea that obsesses all reformers--that she is a more or less passive creature about whom something either ought or ought not to be done, or, for that matter, about whom something can be done. What she should and can do for herself is a different matter; and to that question I intend to address myself before I leave this subject. FOOTNOTES: [1] For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth, for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the owning class.