What vision of life is nobler and more exquisite than that of complete and ideal marital happiness? To find it complete and ideal the modern woman, with all her charms and abilities, must figure in it, I grant; the mere domestic drudge; the tame, amiable house-cat; the doting doll, are no longer pleasing parties of the second part. To admit so much as this may seem to offer room for the argument that the modern woman of a hundred years hence will make her of the poet’s dream of to-day appear no less pitiable; but there we men are ready to take issue. We admit our past tyranny, we cry “Peccavi,” yet we claim at the same time that, having taken her to our bosoms as our veritable, loving companion and helpmate, there is no room left, or very little room left, for more progress in that particular direction. Her next steps, if taken, will be on new lines, not by way of making herself an equal. And therefore it is that we suggest the vision of perfect modern marital happiness as the leading consideration to be taken into account in dealing with this question. Even in the past, when woman was made a drudge and encouraged to remain a fool, the poetry and joy and stimulus of life for her, as well as for her despot mate, lay in the mystery of love, its joys and responsibilities. Even then, if her life were robbed of the opportunity to love and be loved, its savor was gone, however free she might be from masculine tyranny and coercion. Similarly, after making due allowance for the hyperbole as to the influence which woman has on man when he has made up his mind to act to the contrary, there is no power which works for righteousness upon him comparable to the influence of woman. There is always the possibility that the woman a man loves may not be consciously working for righteousness, but the fact that he believes so is the essential truth, even though he be the victim of self-delusion. This element of the case is pertinent to the question whether woman would really try to reform the world, if she had the chance, rather than to this particular consideration. The point of the argument is that the dependence of each sex on the other, and the loving sympathy between them, which is born of dissimilarity, is the salt of human life. The eternal feminine is what we prize in woman, and wherever she deflects from this there does her power wane and her usefulness become impaired. And conversely, the more and the higher she advances along the lines of her own nature, the better for the world. Nor does the claim that she has been hampered hitherto, and consequently been unable to show what her attributes really are, seem relevant; for it is only when she develops in directions which threaten to clash with the eternal feminine that she encounters opposition or serious criticism. And here even the excitability and unreasonableness of such men as our friend Julius Cæsar find a certain justification. Their fumes and fury, however unintelligent, proceed from an