bly
would never have married into the family, had they possessed that
accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor
the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of
Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the
three hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed;--but that Sappho and
Madame de Maintenon could read altogether too well, while the case of
Saint Brigitta, who brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was
clearly exceptional, and afforded no safe precedent.

We take it, that the brilliant Frenchman has touched the root of the
matter. Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question
lies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world
before she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time.
Resistance must be made here or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must
be a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the Chinese
proverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of wisdom,--"For
men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge
is virtue"?

No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws
of gravitation generally. Certainly, there has been but little change in
the legal position of woman since China was in its prime, until within
the last dozen years. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of
English and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife are
one, and that one is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions.
When Blackstone declares that "the very being and existence of the woman
is suspended during the marriage," and American Kent echoes that "her
legal existence and authority are in a manner lost,"--when Petersdorff
asserts that "the husband has the right of imposing such corporeal
restraints as he may deem necessary," and Bacon that "the husband hath,
by law, power and dominion over his wife, and may keep her by force
within the bounds of duty, and may beat her, but not in a violent or
cruel manner,"[A]--when Mr. Justice Coleridge rules that the husband,
in certain cases, "has a right to confine his wife in his own
dwelling-house and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite time,"
and Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, "The wife is only the
_servant_ of her husband,"--these high authorities simply reaffirm the
dogma of the Gentoo code, four thousand years old and more:--"A man,
both day and night, mus