nd many another form of the Mighty Mother who bestowed on women their
peculiar graces and powers. Surely no girl in ancient Greece ever sent
up to all-pervading Zeus a prayer that her natural longings might be
fulfilled; but we may be sure that to Aphrodite came many such prayers.
The deities we worship today are too austere for women to approach with
their peculiar desires, and indeed in Ireland the largest number of
our people do not see any necessity for love-making at all, or what
connection spiritual powers have with the affections. A girl, without
repining, will follow her four-legged dowry to the house of a man she
may never have spoken twenty words to before her marriage. We praise our
women for their virtue, but the general acceptance of the marriage as
arranged shows so unemotional, so undesirable a temperament, that it is
not to be wondered at. One wonders was there temptation.

What the loss to the race may be it is impossible to say, but it is true
that beautiful civilizations are built up by the desire of man to give
his beloved all her desires. Where there is no beloved, but only a
housekeeper, there are no beautiful fancies to create the beautiful
arts, no spiritual protest against the mean dwelling, no hunger build
the world anew for her sake. Aphrodite is outcast and with her many
of the other immortals have also departed. The home life in Ireland is
probably more squalid than with any other people equally prosperous
in Europe. The children begotten without love fill more and more the
teeming asylums. We are without art; literature is despised; we have few
of those industries which spring up in other countries in response to
the desire of woman to make gracious influences pervade the home of her
partner, a desire to which man readily yields, and toils to satisfy if
he loves truly. The desire for beauty has come almost to be regarded as
dangerous, if not sinful; and the woman who is still the natural child
of the Great Mother and priestess of the mysteries, if she betray the
desire to exercise her divinely-given powers, if there be enchantment
in her eyes and her laugh, and if she bewilder too many men, is in our
latest code of morals distinctly an evil influence. The spirit, melted
and tortured with love, which does not achieve its earthly desire, is
held to have wasted its strength, and the judgment which declares the
life to be wrecked is equally severe on that which caused this wild
conflagration in