Beneath this apparent praise of woman lurks her degradation and the egotism of man. The professor depicts woman as a dainty creature, endowed nevertheless with the needful knowledge of arithmetic to keep the household accounts well balanced, caressing like a gentle spring breeze the master of the house, the ruling lion, and with her soft hand smoothing the wrinkles from his forehead, that perhaps have appeared there from brooding over his own stupidity. The professor depicts woman and marriage such as barely one among a hundred actually exist. About the many thousand unhappy marriages, about the great number of women to whom it is never given to attain marriage, and about the millions of women who must slave beside their husbands from morning till night to earn their daily bread, he seems to see and know nothing whatever. All these marriages are stripped of poetry by the harsh reality of life, more quickly than a careless hand strips the colored dust from a butterfly’s wing. One glance at those countless women sufferers would have greatly marred the professor’s poetically tinted picture. The women he observes only constitute a small minority, and it is doubtful whether they represent an advanced type. There is a frequently quoted saying, that the degree of civilization attained by a nation may be measured by the position of its women. We uphold the justice of this saying. But upon applying this standard we find that our highly lauded civilization does not amount to much. In his book on the “Subjection of Women”--the title shows the conception of the position of woman held by the author--John Stuart Mill says: “Men have become more domesticated. Increasing civilization has put more fetters on man in regard to woman.” That is true to some extent wherever an honest marriage relation exists between husband and wife. But to a considerably large minority it does not apply. Intelligent men will recognize, that it is to their own advantage, if women are drawn out into the world from their narrow domestic sphere, and are given an opportunity to become acquainted with the great problems of the day. The “fetters” that are thereby placed on him, are not hard to bear. On the other hand, the question arises whether modern life has not brought new factors into the matrimonial relation that are more apt to destroy marriage than any previously known.