But will men dare the death and slit one another’s weasands for the possession of the New Woman as they have done for the women of the past? I think not. The contempt and incredulity of one sex for the judgment and discrimination of the other, which is chiefly a modern growth induced by woman’s arrogance, is not compatible with suit and service; and, in truth, the enmity between man and woman, shadowed forth in Genesis, is having another lease of life, owing to the fatuous females who cry to-day upon the house-tops. Mr. Romanes wants us to ‘give her the apple, and let us see what comes of it.’ Heaven forbid: let her pluck it if she has the courage and the power, but let us not earn our own condemnation by inviting her to do so. He is of opinion that ‘the days are past when any enlightened man ought seriously to suppose that, in now again reaching forth her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge, woman is preparing for the human race a second Fall.’ There may be two opinions on this head. Women may occasionally surpass in learning the Senior Wrangler of as good a year as was ever known; they may exercise their brains and their muscles to their utmost tension; but let them not in those cases exercise the natural function of woman and bring children into the world. For nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman, if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different, indeed, from the present race as possible, but _how_ different the clamorous females of to-day cannot suspect, or surely they would at once renounce the platform and their prospects of the tribune But it is not to be supposed that even the prospect of peopling the world with stunted and hydrocephalic children will deter the modern woman from her path, even though her modernity lead to the degradation and ultimate extinction of the race. She will raise the old, half-humorous query once more: ‘Why trouble about posterity; what has posterity done for us?’ and thus go her triumphant gait heedless of the second and greater Fall she is preparing for mankind. [Illustration] II.--THE DRESS REFORMERS. ‘I do not like the fashion of your garments--you will say, they are Persian attire, but let them be changed.’--_King Lear._