, of the sexes
towards closer union.

Much is said at the present day on the subject of the "New Woman" (who,
as we have seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic woman of the
remote past, preparing to draw on her new twentieth-century garb):
and it cannot truly be said that her attitude finds a lack of social
attention. On every hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for
her counterfeit, ridiculed, or deified--but nowhere can it be said, that
the phenomenon of her existence is overlooked.

But there exists at the present day another body of social phenomena,
quite as important, as radical, and if possible more far-reaching in its
effects on the present and future, which yet attracts little conscious
attention or animadversion, though it makes itself everywhere felt; as
the shade of a growing tree may be sat under year after year by persons
who never remark its silent growth.

Side by side with the "New Woman," corresponding to her, as the two
sides of a coin cast in one mould, though differing from each other in
superficial detail, are yet of one metal, one size, and one value; old
in the sense in which she is old, being merely the reincarnation under
the pressure of new conditions of the ancient forms of his race; new in
the sense in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation to material
and social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; more
diverse from his immediate progenitors than even the woman is from hers,
side by side with her today in every society and in every class in which
she is found, stands--the New Man!

If it be asked, How comes it to pass, if, under the pressure of social
conditions, man shows an analogous change of attitude toward life,
that the change in woman should attract universal attention, while
the corresponding change in the man of her society passes almost
unnoticed?--it would seem that the explanation lies in the fact that,
owing to woman's less independence of action in the past, any attempt
at change or readaptation on her part has had to overcome greater
resistance, and it is the noise and friction of resistance, more than
the amount of actual change which has taken place, which attracts
attention; as when an Alpine stream, after a long winter frost, breaks
the ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away the obstructions which
have gathered in its bed, all men's attention is attracted to it, though
when later a much larger body of water silently for