ainly to the "yellow" press--has acquired a chastened
liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the
vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the
seaside--all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with
respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful
century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a
change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the
million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen
scraps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into
his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or
so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.

Naturally, women have in this direction developed further than men, for
they had more leeway to make up. Man has so long been the educated
animal that he did not need so much liberalizing. I do not refer to the
Middle Ages, when learning was entirely preempted by the male (with the
exception of poetry and music), for in those days there was no education
save among the priests. I mean rather that the great development of
elementary learning, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth
century, affected men for about a generation before it affected women.
In England, at least, university education for women is very recent, for
Girton was opened only in 1873, Newnham, at Cambridge, in 1875; Miss
Beale made Cheltenham College a power only a little later, and indeed it
may be said that formal education developed only about 1890. Both in
England and in the United States women have not had much more than a
generation to make up the leeway of sixty centuries. It has benefited
them as mothers because they did not start with the prejudices left in
the male mind by the slow evolution from one form of learning to
another; women did not have to live down Plato, Descartes, or Adam
Smith; they began on Haeckel and H. G. Wells. The mothers of to-day have
been flung neck and crop into Paradise; they came in for the new times,
which are always better than the old times and inferior only to
to-morrow. They were made to understand a possible democracy in the
nursery because all round them, even in Russia, even in Turkey,
democracy was growing, some say as a rose, some say as a weed, but
anyhow irrepressibly. Who could be a queen by the cradle when more
august thrones were tottering? So woman quite suddenly