88 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE-XII 



been very little practical advance in the entire East and 

 South of the country during the last fifty years, and that 

 even in the extreme Western States, where women have 

 been given political rights and duties to some extent, the 

 concessions have been wavering and doubtful. 



At this, he took up his parable and said that women 

 ought to have all other rights except political; that they 

 are unfit to discharge political duties ; that, indeed, one of 

 the great difficulties of the world at present lies in their 

 possession of far more consideration and control than 

 they ought to have. &quot; Go into the streets and bazaars,&quot; 

 he said, &quot;and you will see the vast majority of shops de 

 voted to their necessities. In France everything centers 

 in women, and women have complete control of life : all 

 contemporary French literature shows this. Woman is 

 not man s equal in the highest qualities ; she is not so self- 

 sacrificing as man. Men will, at times, sacrifice their fami 

 lies for an idea ; women will not. On my demurring to 

 this latter statement, he asked me if I ever knew a woman 

 who loved other people s children as much as her own. I 

 gladly answered in the negative, but cited Florence 

 Nightingale, Sister Dora, and others, expressing my sur 

 prise at his assertion that women are incapable of making 

 as complete sacrifices for any good cause as men. I 

 pointed to the persecutions in the early church, when 

 women showed themselves superior to men in suffering 

 torture, degradation, and death in behalf of the new re 

 ligion, and added similar instances from the history of 

 witchcraft. To this he answered that in spite of all such 

 history, women will not make sacrifices of their own in 

 terest for a good cause which does not strikingly appeal 

 to their feelings, while men will do so; that he had 

 known but two or three really self-sacrificing women in 

 his life; and that these were unmarried. On my saying 

 that observation had led me to a very different conclu 

 sion, his indictment took another form. He insisted that 

 woman hangs upon the past; that public opinion pro 

 gresses, but that women are prone to act on the opinion 



