Woman is essentially narrow-minded and individualistic. Her time has ever been fleeted in working for the individual, and the community would be badly off at this day had not the State been thoroughly masculine for a time that goes back beyond the historians into the regions of myths and fairy tales. Small brains cannot engender great thoughts; which is but another way of saying that woman’s brain is less than man’s. It is only recently that woman has organized her forces at all, and she would not have done so, even now, had she not a plentiful lack of anything to occupy her thoughts withal in these days of the subdivision of labour and of extended luxury. And so, with plenty of time to spare, she begins to ask if there is nothing that becomes her better than the ‘suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer.’ But although Carlyle said in his wrath that men and women were mostly fools, yet there be children nourished with nature’s food who have developed a certain force of intellect; and as for the chronicles of small beer, gossip and scandal-mongering have never been compulsory in women, but only unwelcome features of their nature. Idleness, luxury, and the supreme consideration with which even the most foolish feminine manifestations have been received, have always been fruitful sources of mischief, and this by-past consideration has favoured the development of vanity and the growth of the feminine Ego to its present proportions. Woman never becomes more than an ineffectual amateur in all the careers she enters. Her practice in art and literature inevitably debases art and letters, for she is a copyist at most. In literature she never originates, but appropriates and assimilates men’s thoughts, and in the transcription of those thoughts seldom rises above the use of _clichés_. But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons; but she does not stop to consider that those distinguished women succeeded not because, but in spite of, their sex, and that few of the women who have made what the world terms successful careers had any of the more gracious feminine characteristics beyond their merely physiological attributes. Many of them were unsexed creatures whose womanhood was an accident of their birth.