great they are. That they can be
removed at the present day is utterly out of the question. But something
may be gained by stating them even imperfectly. At the risk of making
blunders and uttering extravagances, I shall make the attempt. I am
impelled to do so by a recent conversation with one of the cleverest
students that I ever had, who acknowledged his total inability to
understand some of the commonest facts in Western life,--all those facts
relating, directly or indirectly, to the position of woman in Western
literature as reflecting Western life.

Let us clear the ground it once by putting down some facts in the plainest
and lowest terms possible. You must try to imagine a country in which the
place of the highest virtue is occupied, so to speak, by the devotion of
sex to sex. The highest duty of the man is not to his father, but to his
wife; and for the sake of that woman he abandons all other earthly ties,
should any of these happen to interfere with that relation. The first duty
of the wife may be, indeed, must be, to her child, when she has one; but
otherwise her husband is her divinity and king. In that country it would
be thought unnatural or strange to have one's parents living in the same
house with wife or husband. You know all this. But it does not explain for
you other things, much more difficult to understand, especially the
influence of the abstract idea of woman upon society at large as well as
upon the conduct of the individual. The devotion of man to woman does not
mean at all only the devotion of husband to wife. It means actually
this,--that every man is bound by conviction and by opinion to put all
women before himself, simply because they are women. I do not mean that
any man is likely to think of any woman as being his intellectual and
physical superior; but I do mean that he is bound to think of her as
something deserving and needing the help of every man. In time of danger
the woman must be saved first. In time of pleasure, the woman must be
given the best place. In time of hardship the woman's share of the common
pain must be taken voluntarily by the man as much as possible. This is not
with any view to recognition of the kindness shown. The man who assists a
woman in danger is not supposed to have any claim upon her for that
reason. He has done his duty only, not to her, the individual, but to
womankind at large. So we have arrived at this general fact, that the
first place in all things