She has fought polygamy with incessant hatred; not only for its injury to herself, but its constant menace to her children. The secret strings of the woman's heart are wrapped about the fruit of her own flesh, but the desire of the man is to the woman, and this desire she has used as a lever to work her will--not consciously, perhaps, not with reasoned forethought, but with the iron tenacity of blind instinct. Reasoned will may be baffled or deflected, but water can by no means be induced to run up hill; and so while woman has been apparently as fluidly yielding as water--to be led here and driven there according to the will of her master--she has stuck to her own ends with a silent persistency that has always tired out opposition at last. She has, like Charity, suffered all things, endured all things; she has been all things to all men. She has yielded all outward show of authority; she has submitted to be scoffed at as an inferior creation, to be sneered at for feebleness and shallow-mindedness, to be laughed at for chattering inconsequence, and to be regarded as a toy and trifle to amuse man's leisure hours, or as a dull drudge for his convenience, for ends are not achieved by talking about them. All the ages of masculine discussion of the Eternal Feminine show no reply from her, but to-day the world is a woman's world. Civilization has, under the unrelaxing pressure of endless generations of her persistent will, been bent to her ends. Polygamy is routed, and the errant fancy of the male tamed to yield itself to a single yoke. She has, "with bare and bloody feet, climbed the steep road of wide empire," but to-day she stands at the top--mistress of the world. Man, with his talents, his strength, and his selfishness, has been tamed to her hand. The sensual, dominant brute with whom she began what Max Nordau calls "the toilsome, slow ascent of the long curve leading up to civilization," stands beside her to-day, hat in hand, her lover--husband; tender, faithful, courteous, and indulgent. This is the conquest that has been made, the crown and throne achieved by the silent, uneducated woman of the past. Monogamous marriage is the foundation stone on which has been built her power; a power which, while it has endured to her own benefit, has not been exercised for selfish ends. She has raised the relation between man and herself from a mere contract of sensuality or convenience to a spiritual sacrament within whose limits the purest and most exalted of human emotions find play. For the coarse indulgence and bitter enmities of polygamy has been substituted the happiest of bonds, in which the higher natures find room for the subtlest and completest felicities, and within which the man, the woman, and the child form a holy trinity of mutual love and well-being.