As wives--well, save in the old nursery doggrel which sets forth that they are made of 'all that's good if well understood'--as wives certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a husband knows where the shoe pinches, and if he blasphemes during the wearing of it, on his own head be the guilt as is already the punishment. As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of humanity, and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic world we are told to look for the time when the moral supremacy of woman shall be the recognized law of human life and the reign of violence and tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end. Thus the moral loveliness of collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught from their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of experience, and women naturally keep them up to the mark--theoretically, at all events. Yet for all this lip-homage, of which so much account is made, women are often ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of their superior pretensions as often fall below men in every quality but that of patience. And patience is eminently the virtue of weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking broadly and allowing for exceptions. But what women do not see is that all this poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing passion of men, and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and analyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth. And this would be the best thing for them in the end. If they could but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, they would rise beyond the power of much that now degrades them. If they would but honestly consider the question of their own shortcomings when told where they fail, and what they cannot do, and what they will be sure to make a mess of if they attempt, they would prove their title to man's respect far more than they prove it now by the shrill cries and indignant remonstrances of affronted womanhood.