Now, no man can regard as insignificant any fact concerning woman, disproportionate as the importance of the fact may be made to appear in comparison with other facts concerning her, so that we have no greater difficulty in appreciating the noisy announcement of the New Woman than in appreciating the only less audible contention that there is no such appearance. Happily the foolish discussion is over. Only a few catch-words now remind us of the hopeless debate. Of course, Eve was the only new woman. She alone was incontrovertibly new; and to seek by trick of title to invest with newness any woman who came after her, was a frivolous and degenerate conspiracy. Not, indeed, that newness is intrinsically a defect, though heraldry and afternoon teas may be arranged upon that assumption; but in effect it is belittling, destructive of certain benefits of the doubt, insulting to the woman of the past and skeptical as to the woman of the present. However, our national past and our national present are so full of superficial and even of fundamental contrasts, that if ever a merciful sentence is to be passed upon one who, peering through the “turbid media” of sociological analysis, mistakes the _Zeitgeist_ for a new woman, it is in our own longitudes. Like a child growing up under the eye of an arrogant and pompous parent, we have, nationally, been made to feel from the beginning that we are new, even tentative, that we are unclassified, all but vagrant in the ethnological sense. It is possible that recent events will modify in certain important ways, external contemplation of us as a nation, that, in spite of certain new effects which we may be accused of producing, a consciousness and a recognition of our definite maturity may have some responsive effect in ourselves. Meanwhile it is pleasantly easy to detect many interesting changes in the situation of the American girl within the span of the century. Whether she merely illustrates the social and political changes which have taken place, or, as we so often have been urged to believe, actually indicates why they have taken place, she presents a spectacle of peculiar interest, a spectacle which has so successfully piqued the analytical spirit of the period that it would be expounding the commonplace to do more than quickly sketch a few of the outlines.