attles about
precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp
of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little
pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little
ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her
spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests,
to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of
all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be
difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World
was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the
influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion
to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or
from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far
outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human
considerations.

If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish
bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to
barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock
for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old
World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can
hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of
absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and
Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the
State.

Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and
interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and
political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive
spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially
a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and
adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit,
of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make
her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore
merciless persecutor.

It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in
the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or
moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and
against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
There are few husban