the men are wholly responsible for "The
Doll's House," and the women would come out if they could. We have
noticed the man who prefers his ease to any troubling duty: he has his
mate in the woman who prefers to be wooed with trinkets, chocolates, and
the theatre to a more beautiful way of life, that would give her a
nobler place but more strenuous conditions. Again, the man is not always
the lord of the house. He is as often, if not more frequently, its
slave. Then there are the conventions of life. In place of a fine sense
of courtesy prevailing between man and woman, which would recognise with
the woman's finer sensibility a fine self-reliance, and with the man's
greater strength a fine gentleness, we have a false code of manners, by
which the woman is to be taken about, petted and treated generally as
the useless being she often is; while the man becomes an effeminate
creature that but cumbers the earth. Fine courtesy and fine comradeship
go together. But we have allowed a standard to gain recognition that is
a danger alike to the dignity of our womanhood and the virility of our
manhood. It is for us who are men to labour for a finer spirit in our
manhood: we cannot throw the blame for any weakness over on external
conditions. The woman is in the same position. She must understand that
greater than the need of the suffrage is the more urgent need of making
her fellow-woman spirited and self-reliant, ready rather to anticipate a
danger than to evade it. When she is thus trained, not all the men of
all the nations can deny her recognition and equality.

III

For the battle of to-morrow then there is a preliminary fight to-day.
The woman must come to this point, too. In life there is frequently so
much meanness, a man is often called to acknowledge some degrading
standard or fight for the very recognition of manhood, and the woman
must stand in with him or help to pull him down. Let her understand this
and her duty is present and urgent. The man so often wavers on the verge
of the right path, the woman often decides him. If she is nobler than
he, as is frequently the case, she can lift him to her level; if she is
meaner, as she often is, she as surely drags him down. When they are
both equal in spirit and nobility of nature, how the world is filled
with a glory that should assure us, if nothing else could, of the truth
of the Almighty God and a beautiful Eternity to explain the origin and
destiny of their wonderfu