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, isa 
fundamental defect in our social scheme, 
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 bea 
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 
Dependence of 
woman. 
* 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 medieval stage, or dawn of medizvalism, 
