vers to live together outside them.

As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife
should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view,
still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany
and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He
does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the
whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should
provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the
home, pray and wait.

This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a
hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually
grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the
older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch
together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of
promise.

In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown
up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers
did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that
the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and
dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities
together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political
revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their
equal share of opportunity.

But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete,
and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of
physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political
lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly
or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set
them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there
was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there
was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life,
the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only
would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its
deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.

In their reactions against old abuses, wri