I call you hard To general suffering. Here's the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalized With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too!... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?--does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls, And pine and die because of the great sum Of universal anguish?--Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad. You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping; but a million sick-- You could as soon weep for the rule of three Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world, Uncomprehended by you.--Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives, Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,--and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind. Women and Economics BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (See page 200) Recognizing her intense feeling on moral lines, and seeing in her the rigidly preserved virtues of faith, submission, and self-sacrifice--qualities which in the dark ages were held to be the first of virtues,--we have agreed of late years to call woman the moral superior of man. But the ceaseless growth of human life, social life, has developed in him new virtues, later, higher, more needful; and the moral nature of woman, as maintained in this rudimentary stage by her economic dependence, is a continual check to the progress of the human soul. The main feature of her life--the restriction of her range and duty to the love and service of her own immediate family--acts upon us continually as a retarding influence, hindering the expansion of the spirit of social love and service on which our very lives depend. It keeps the moral standard of the patriarchal era still before us, and blinds our eyes to the full duty of man. The Wrongfulness of Riches BY GRANT ALLEN (English essayist and nature student, 1848-1899) If you are on the side of the spoilers, then you are a bad man. If you are on the side of social justice, then you are a good one. There is no effective test of high morality at the present day save this.