?)

Thoughtful men sighed over the present and yearned for the past, nor
seem to have perceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the Roman
lady who, with a hundred servants standing idle about her, should, in
imitation of her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her head
to draw water from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-led
streams gushed forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; that
had she insisted on resuscitating her loom and had sat up all night
to spin, she could never have produced those fabrics which alone her
household demanded, and would have been but a puerile actor; that it was
not by attempting to return to the ancient and for ever closed fields of
toil, but by entering upon new, that she could alone serve her race
and retain her own dignity and virility. That not by bearing water and
weaving linen, but by so training and disciplining herself that she
should be fitted to bear her share in the labour necessary to the just
and wise guidance of a great empire, and be capable of training a race
of men adequate to exercise an enlightened, merciful, and beneficent
rule over the vast masses of subject people--that so, and so only,
could she fulfil her duty toward the new society about her, and bear its
burden together with man, as her ancestresses of bygone generations had
borne the burden of theirs.

That in this direction, and this alone, lay the only possible remedy for
the evils of woman's condition, was a conception apparently grasped
by none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the
parasitic woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left
even in her degradation!)--seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and
sensuality to fill the void left by the lack of honourable activity;
accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and
an unlimited consumption in the place of production; too enervated at
last to care even to produce offspring, and shrinking from every form
of endurance--remains, even to the present day, the most perfect, and
therefore the most appalling, picture of the parasite female that earth
has produced--a picture only less terrible than it is pathetic.

We recognise that it was inevitable that this womanhood--born it would
seem from its elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and in place
thereof feeding on it--should at last have given birth to a manhood as
effete as itself, and that both should in the end h