ason the
Mistress could give, when she rearranged her apartment, for hanging a
picture in what seemed the most inappropriate place, was that it had
never been there before. Woman has no respect for tradition, and
because a thing is as it is is sufficient reason for changing it.
When she gets into law, as she has come into literature, we shall
gain something in the destruction of all our vast and musty libraries
of precedents, which now fetter our administration of individual
justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not so
sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken
poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination,
they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less
failures in business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for
their flowers which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part
with a leaf or a blossom from their family. They love the flowers
for themselves. A woman raises flowers for their use. She is
destruct-ion in a conservatory. She wants the flowers for her lover,
for the sick, for the poor, for the Lord on Easter day, for the
ornamentation of her house. She delights in the costly pleasure of
sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she has an intense but
probably sinless desire to pick it.

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been
thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she
has obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun
uses to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I am not surprised
to learn that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of
the original rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to
which she has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition
among the primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a
platform of grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is
not, unless a better civilization has wrought a change in her behalf,
permitted to eat people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men;
the dainty enjoyed by the men being considered too good to be wasted
on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the degradation of
woman? By a refinement of cruelty she receives no benefit whatever
from the missionaries who are sent out by--what to her must seem a
new name for Tantalus--the American Board.

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her
regret at the