Instances, neither few nor far between, may be urged of wives and mothers, possibly also sisters and maiden aunts, who have raised men to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable industry. True, indeed, it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to deny their influence and its beneficent effects; but to use it as an argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a _non sequitur_ of the most absurd description. The influence wielded by those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to themselves and their sex; because they were, in a word, so womanly. The influence of the New Woman upon the man is, and shall be, _nil_, because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man fight for supremacy. Women’s advocates come and go like summer flies, provoking to wrath by their insistent buzzing, but, when caught and examined, proving to be insignificant enough. They have their little day, and cease to be. Who, for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person who floated into publicity on the ‘Marriage a Failure’ correspondence of the _Daily Telegraph_, some few years ago, and, in the heyday of her notoriety, wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel, _The Wing of Azrael_? Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of greater licence. And so the game proceeds: each woman daring a little further than her fellow-adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection; of freedom in contracting marriages and licence in dissolving them; each newcomer shocking the sensibilities of women readers with delightful thrills from the impropriety, expressed or implied, that runs through her pages as inevitably as the watermark runs through ‘laid’ paper. It is amusing to note that, following the lead of the late lamented George Eliot, the greater number of these women writers of sexual novels scribble under manly pseudonyms. What, then! doth divinity after all hedge a man so nearly that to masquerade as a ‘John Oliver Hobbes,’ or a ‘George Egerton,’ is to draw an admiring crowd of women worshippers where, as plain Miss or Mrs., your immortal writings would fall flat? What a deplorable _cacoëthes imprimendi_ this is, to be sure, that seizes upon the palpitating authoresses of _Yellow Asters_, _Dancing Fawns_, _or Heavenly Twins_; and how depraved the taste for indelicate innuendo and theories of licence that renders these books popular!