are plucky indeed, and prove easily enough
that there is a large and growing body of women in Germany, who have
minds and wills of their own and great executive ability.

Let me suggest to some of our idle women that they pay a visit to the
Hausfrauenbund at Frankfort and the Frauenverein-Arbeitererinnenheim
at Munich, before they pass judgment upon this chapter. For I should
be sorry to leave the impression that all the women of Germany are
listless, oppressed, and without any feeling of civic responsibility.

All these things have been accomplished by women in Germany with far
less sympathy from the men than they receive in America or in England.
Cato wrote of women's suffrage: "Pray what will they not assail, if
they carry their point? Call to mind all the principles governing them
by which your ancestors have held the presumption of women in check,
and made them subject to their husbands. ... As soon as they have begun
to be your equals they will be your superiors." It is an older story
than the unread realize, this of the rights of women. The bulk of
Germany's male population still hold to Cato's view. It is not so much
that they are antagonistic, except in the case of the teachers, where
the women have become active competitors; they are in their patient
way impervious. Nor can it be said that any very large number of the
women themselves are eager for more rights; rather are they becoming
restless because they receive so little consideration.

Their pleasures are simple and restricted, regular attendance at the
theatre, at concerts, an occasional dinner at a restaurant to
celebrate an anniversary, excursions with the whole family to a beer
restaurant of a Sunday, and the endless meeting together for reading,
sewing, and gossip -- no German woman apparently but what belongs to a
verein or circle, meeting, say, once a week.

The women and the men are gregarious. Vae soli is the motto of the
race. They love to take their pleasures in crowds, and I am not sure
that this does not dull the enthusiasm for personal rights and
gratifications, and for individual supremacy and dignity. It is rare
to find a German who would subscribe to Andrew Marvell's misogynist
lines:

"Two paradises are in one
To live in Paradise alone."

It is typical of this love of being together that an independent
member of the Reichstag, owing allegiance to no party, is called a
Wilde, and this same word Wilde, or wild man, is applied to th