rint them to the extent of five hundred pages, as the archdeacon did, and
all his gospel of silence would exhale itself in a single sigh of regret in
the preface.

VIRTUES IN COMMON

A young friend of mine, who was educated at one of the very best schools
for girls in New York city, told me that one day her teacher requested the
older girls to write out a list of virtues suitable to manly character,
which they did. A month or more later, when this occurrence was well
forgotten, the same teacher bade them write out a list of womanly virtues,
she making no reference to the other list. Then she made each girl compare
her lists; and they all found with surprise that there was no substantial
difference between them. The only variation, in most cases, was, that they
had put in a rather vague special virtue of "manliness" in the one case,
and "womanliness" in the other; a sort of miscellaneous department or "odd
drawer," apparently, in which to group all traits not easily analyzed.

The moral is that, as tested by the common sense of these young people,
duty is duty, and the difference between ethics for men and ethics for
women lies simply in practical applications, not in principles.

Who can deny that the philosopher Antisthenes was right when he said, "The
virtues of the man and the woman are the same"? Not the Christian,
certainly; for he accepts as his highest standard the being who in all
history best united the highest qualities of both sexes. Not the
metaphysician; for his analysis deals with the human mind as such, not with
the mind of either sex. Not the evolutionist; for he is accustomed to trace
back qualities to their source, and cannot deny that there is in each sex
at least a "survival" of every good and every bad trait. We may say that
these qualities are, or may be, or ought to be, distributed unequally
between the sexes; but we cannot reasonably deny that each sex possesses a
share of every quality, and that what is good in one sex is also good in
the other. Man may be the braver, and yet courage in a woman may be nobler
than cowardice. Woman may be the purer, and yet purity may be noble in a
man.

So clear is this, that some of the very coarsest writers in all literature,
and those who have been severest upon women, have yet been obliged to
acknowledge it. Take, for instance, Dean Swift, who writes:--

"I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman, which
is not equally so