A still more serious danger lies in the endless multiplication of clubs, which offers an irresistible temptation to those who like to cull a little here, and a little there, without too exacting effort in any direction. They may all be valuable in themselves, but because it is good to belong to one or two active clubs of different aims, it does not follow that it is good to belong to a dozen; and I know of a woman who claims with pride that she belongs to twenty-two! “Moderation is the charm of life,” said Jean Paul, and one sees with regret how little of that sort of charm there is left; indeed, I am not sure that it has not ceased to be considered a charm. We may find a note of warning in the later days of the great salons. The social life of the eighteenth century reads like a page of our own, with its whirl of _conversazioni_, its talks on science, its experiments in chemistry, physiology, psychology, its mania for discussing literature, art, and philosophy. The literary salons had blossomed into great centers of intellectual brilliancy, of which all this life was the natural pendant. It was the fashion then, as now, for women to concern themselves with affairs of state; to talk of the rights of man, though they had less to say than we have about the rights of woman; to dream of a social millennium, which they were doomed to wade through rivers of blood without reaching. They too invaded the secrets of the laboratory, and even the surgeon’s domain. We hear of a young countess who carried a skeleton in her trunk when she went on a journey, “as one might carry a book to read,” in order to study anatomy. These women, like ourselves, aimed to know a little of everything. They too were fired with the passion for intelligence and the passion for multitudes. With the craving for novelties came the ever-growing need of a stronger spice to make them palatable. In this carnival of the mind they lost their faith and simplicity, loved with their brains instead of their hearts, forgot their natural duties, and found natural ties irksome. Longing for rest without the power to rest, they suffered from maladies of the nerves, and were devoured with the ennui of exhaustion. Life lost its equilibrium, and the result was inevitable. The reaction from the restlessness of an intellect that is not fed from inner sources, but finds its stimulus and theater alike in the world, was toward an exaggeration of the sensibilities. “If I could become calm, I should believe myself on a wheel,” said one whose brilliancy had dazzled a generation. This fatal “too much” was not the least of the causes that lost to women the empire they had won. All movements are measured, in the end, by a standard of common sense, and reactions are in proportion to the deviation from a just mean. The revolution which brought liberty to men, or at least shifted the burdens to some one else, deprived women of what they had. They were forbidden