“The Woman question will not down. She is asserting herself in every direction, and generally with considerable force. In America she is positively alarming the lords of creation by her rapid progress in educational matters. She is actually outrunning the men in the race for intellectual attainments. And this fact is becoming so evident, and so prominent, that a new problem is being evolved from it. This is, how are the finely educated young women of America to find congenial husbands? It is assumed by some writers that already there is a great disparity between the culture of the young men and young women, and that every year the chasm between them is becoming deeper and wider. This is a truly lamentable state of things, but the woman movement in this country is likely to take a more practical course. The agitation of the question of Woman Suffrage may bring about a reaction against her excessive culture. If woman is permitted to enter the cesspool of politics, it is probable she will not be very long distressed with an overplus of those qualities which are just now endangering her conjugal felicity in the United States....” It is refreshing and consolatory to revert from such verbiage to what Sir Humphrey Davy said (“Lectures, 1810 and 1811”): “It has been too much the custom to endeavour to attach ridicule to the literary and scientific acquisitions of women. Let _them_ make it disgraceful for men to be ignorant, and ignorance will perish.” To Shakespeare and Goethe may be added the corroboration of French intellect:— “N’est-il pas évident que Molière, dans ses _Femmes Savantes_ n’a pas attaqué l’instruction, l’étude, mais le pédantisme, comme, dans son _Tartuffe_, il avait attaqué non la vraie dévotion, mais l’hypocrisie? N’est-ce pas Molière lui-même qui a écrit ce beau vers: “Et je veux qu’une femme ait des clartés _de tout_?”—Monseigneur Dupanloup, Evêque d’Orléans (“Femmes Savantes et Femmes Studieuses,” 1868, p. 8). “C’est à Condorcet et non pas à Jean Jacques, comme on le croit généralement, qu’appartient l’initiative des réformes proposées dans l’éducation et la condition des femmes.”—Daniel Stern (“Hist. de la Révolution de 1848,” Vol. II, p. 185). “Quand la loi française”—(shall we not say also every other?)—“déclare la femme inférieure à l’homme ce n’est jamais pour libérer la femme d’un devoir vis-à-vis de l’homme ou de la société, c’est pour armer l’homme ou la société d’un droit de plus contre elle. Il n’est jamais venu à l’idée de la loi de tenir compte de la faiblesse de la femme dans les différents délits qu’elle peut commettre; au contraire, la loi en abuse.”—A. Dumas fils (“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” etc., p. 204).