heerful faith in the cause,
just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.

There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.

A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
growth."

L. G. C.

THE

MODERN WOMEN.

THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.

Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to