r of a social, charitable, or economic institute is
also a member of the great army for the future redemption of their
beloved country. The Polish language being forbidden in the schools,
every noble Polish woman becomes a schoolmistress of her language at
home, not only for her children, but also for her servants and those who
are drawn under her sway. Polish women of the higher class once had the
reputation of being frivolous; if so, they have become chastened by the
one absorbing idea of patriotism and the restoration of Poland. They are
elegant _grandes dames_ in a higher degree than German ladies of their
class with their substantial virtues, and more self-controlled and
faithful than their French sisters, though their hearts and heads are
surely not colder. Of course, woman's nature is as complex and as
unclassifiable in Poland as elsewhere, and generalization will therefore
always remain onesided; but the Polish type of womanhood is
unmistakable; so is the preponderance of the feminine element over the
masculine. Brandes is quite right when he quotes the opinion of an
Italian author: "Among Germanic races the men are more gifted than the
women; among the Latin races they stand on the same level; among the
Poles, the most characteristic Slavic race, woman is decidedly superior
to man as to intellectual qualities, passion, courage, wit, patriotism.
Polish history is pervaded as with a red thread with heroic deeds of
women. They have aroused whole districts to rebellion against foreign
oppressors, fought in battles, endured the hardships of camp and march,
and died on the battlefield." We need only read Henryk Sienkiewicz's
novels to find such real types of Polish women-heroes in all the domains
of warlike and political activity. The rebellions of 1830-1831 and 1863
found female warriors, as real combatants, in every Polish detachment.
The Polish noblewoman Emilia Plater, sung in Mickiewicz's brilliant
pasan, _The Colonel's Death_, raised a detachment of patriots, fought in
many battles, tried to break with the sword the iron girdle of the
enemies surrounding her corps, and finally died in a forest cabin, in
December, 1831, of her wounds and from fatigue and hunger. The female
martyrs who have followed voluntarily their exiled husbands or fathers
to Siberia may be counted by thousands. No wonder that the Poles love
their women with extraordinary tenderness and gladly concede to them the
palm of superiority!

It must