Elmeteita. In view of this general and thorough inter-blending of the most ordinary physical with the highest mental activity, it is impossible to speak of any distinction of class or social status. The agriculturists here are as highly respected, as cultured gentlemen, as the learned, the artists, or the higher officials; and there is nothing to prevent those who harmonise with them in character and sentiment from treating them as friends and equals in society. But the women--elsewhere the staunchest upholders of aristocratic exclusiveness--in this country are the most zealous advocates of a complete amalgamation of all the different sections of the population. The Freeland woman, almost without exception, has attained to a very high degree of ethical and intellectual culture. Relieved of all material anxiety and toil, her sole vocation is to ennoble herself, to quicken her understanding for all that is good and lofty. As she is delivered from the degrading necessity of finding in her husband one upon whom she is dependent for her livelihood, as she does not derive her social position from the occupation of her husband, but from her own personal worth, she is consequently free from that haughty exclusiveness which is to be found wherever real excellences are wanting. The women of the so-called better classes among us at home treat their less fortunate sisters with such repellent arrogance simply because they cannot get rid of the instinctive feeling that these poorer sisters would have very well occupied their own places, and _vice versâ_, had their husbands been changed. And even when it is not so, when the European 'lady' actually does possess a higher ethical and intellectual character, she is obliged to confess that her position in the opinion of the world depends less upon her own qualities than upon the rank and position of her husband--that is, upon another, who could just as well have placed any other woman upon the borrowed throne. Schopenhauer is not altogether wrong: women are mostly engaged in one and the same pursuit--man-hunting--and it is the envy of competition that lies at the bottom of their pride. Only he forgets to add, or rather he does not know, that this pursuit, which is common to all women, and which he lashes so unmercifully, is, with all its hateful evil consequences, the inevitable result of their lack of legal rights, and is in no way indissolubly bound up with their nature.