It is hardly necessary to say that any criticism of the Englishwoman in these pages is not an attack upon her: nor is any approbation to be considered a defence. At least I pay this much respect to my uncle Joseph that no woman shall flatter me into defending her: she is more than capable of doing this for herself. But, beyond this, I quite fail to understand what a friend of mine meant when he suggested that I should write in defence of women. “Against whom or against what?” I asked, but his explanation was not lucid. I gathered that he had in mind the complaint sometimes heard that women have ceased to be women in order to become inferior men; that they are getting hard and conceited; that they turn up their noses at the domestic virtues, at marriage and the whole conception of life as duty, and that they think only of having “a good time.” The isolated instances given as grounds for this complaint are, I am convinced, not typical. That women have developed and broken through the far too narrow restrictions of a hundred years ago is only a matter for thankfulness: something is always lost in every adjustment, but more is gained if the adjustment is natural. The flighty girl whom most grumblers of this kind have in mind is only a fraction, and a very imperfect fraction, of the Englishwoman. A far more serious line was taken by Henry Adams towards the end of his life, when he became finally convinced that he was a man of the eighteenth century living in an unfamiliar world whose guiding forces he could not fathom. Musing over the enormous mass of new forces put into the hand of man by the end of the nineteenth century, he wondered what should be the result of so much energy turned over to the use of women, according to the scientific notions of force. He could not write down the equation. The picture of the world that he saw was of man bending eagerly over the steering wheel of a rushing motor car too intent on keeping up a high speed and avoiding accidents to have leisure for any distractions. The old attraction of the woman, one of the most powerful forces of the past, had become a distraction, and woman, no longer able to inspire men, had been forced to follow them. Woman had been set free: as travellers, typists, telephone girls, factory hands, they moved untrammelled in the world. But in what direction were they moving? After the men, said Henry Adams; discarding all the qualities for which men had no longer any interest or pleasure, they too were bending over the steering wheel in the same rapid career. Woman the rebel was now free and there was only one thing left for her to rebel against, maternity, or the inertia of sex, to speak in terms of force. Inertia of sex, the philosopher truly remarked, could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force was working irresistibly to overcome it. What would happen? Henry Adams gave up the riddle, grateful for the illusion that woman alone of all