Searching carefully to find at what period of the world’s history the initial superiority of the woman was obvious prior to its temporary subversion, I find on page 70 the approximate date given in the following passage:-- The action of heredity has been to equalise what every tendency of environment and education made to differ. This has saved us from such a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman and held down the man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a race with one sex a million years behind the other. Clearly, then, the decline and fall of woman dates back at least one million years. In practical retrospection there must be a Statute of Limitations. Neither Mrs. Stetson nor any one else knows what men or women were like a million years ago, or even ten thousand years ago. Nor is it permissible to turn, as Mrs. Stetson frequently does, to feeble-minded contemporary savages. Darwin, unlike the majority of those who quote him, did not profess to know everything, or to be able to supply the history of events of which no record has been left. We have no reason whatever for imagining that our ancestors were lacking in fortitude and intellectual vigour, and we have much for believing that no highly civilised race will ever be developed from the savage tribes with which we are acquainted. “From the good and brave are born the brave.” Horace knew probably as much about heredity as most of us do, and the average person’s principal debt to Darwin is his emancipation from the bondage of Hebrew mythology. While declining, therefore, to follow Mrs. Stetson in her wonderful flights of fancy with regard to unknown times and races of mankind, and acknowledging myself incapable of judging whether women have become more or less feminine as compared with prehistoric times, I agree with Mrs. Stetson, so far as regards a section of American and English society, when she says (p. 149) that “women are growing honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free--more human in all ways,” and that this improvement has been at least coincident with, and to some extent due to, the effort to become at least _capable_ of economic independence. But Mrs. Stetson takes a flying leap when from these premisses she jumps to the conclusion that the wife’s economic independence of the husband is necessary to prevent the evils consequent on women being dependent on marriage for a living. Mrs. Stetson makes no distinction between the effects of economic dependence before marriage and economic dependence after marriage. But provided that before marriage a woman is able to support herself with sufficient ease to render her a free agent, and that she retains the _power_ of being self-supporting should economic necessity from any cause arise after marriage, what is the objection to pecuniary dependence on the husband? I see none whatever.