326 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



" However that may be, the false position which 

 women occupy, demonstrated as it is in the most glaring 



way by the institution of the lady, is a 



Dependence of r ■< ^ijr^- -ii 



^ fundamental defect m our social scheme, 



woman. 



and this defect, proceeding from the 

 very heart of it, must spread its baneful influence in all 

 directions. 



" That woman is by nature meant to obey may be 

 seen by the fact that every woman who is placed in the 

 unnatural position of complete independence, imme- 

 diately attaches herself to some man, by whom she al- 

 lows herself to be guided and ruled. It is because she 

 needs a lord and master. If she is young, it will be a 

 lover; if she is old, a priest." * 



Such, in brief, is the indictment Pessimism brings 

 against woman. We may eliminate from it the weak 

 discussion of marriage, and the childish impotence of 



* In a similar vein are the following words, which Mr. Harold 

 Frederic puts into the mouth of his cynical Dr. Ledsmar : 



"Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all 

 the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying 

 dreams of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have 

 never so much as heard in their waking hours ; they pass through 

 the lust for digging caves, building fires, sleeping out in the 

 woods, hunting with bows and arrows — all remote and ancestral 

 impulses ; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on, at 

 regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, 

 just as they were played in the bronze age, and Heaven only 

 knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this, and 

 leaves it behind him — so completely that the grown man feels 

 himself more a stranger among boys of his own place who are 

 thinking and doing precisely the things he thought and did a 

 few years before, than he would among the Kurds or Eskimos. 

 But the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more pre- 

 cocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stub- 

 bing along somewhere in the Neolithic period, she has flown away 

 ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of niedia;valism, 



