There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and philosophers and high-class playwrights are the women who have been bred mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly, matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them--such as are portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society, but it is the best society--for the "women whose beauty and sweetness and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again." If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment and of lack of opportunity--never from lack of intelligence and other soul-powers. There is no sex in spiritual endowments, and woman seems entitled to all the rights of man--plus the right of protection. Ruskin says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of one sex over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give." In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has come, Tennyson says in "The Princess": Yet in the long years liker must they grow: The man be more of woman, she of man; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the _wrestling_ thews that throw the world; She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind. Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother. While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, see that thou returnest with thy shield or on it." Napoleon claimed that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its men.