the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the
goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be
so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life,
and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage,
never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are
brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during
the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine
franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in
which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as
the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as
yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an
invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it
is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to
every notion that passes current in the world.

As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands
of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the
assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger
sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must
have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the
ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it
originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in
the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of
ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve,
though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague
feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up
a gap in man's daily life.

Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have
moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has
been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have
become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from
childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that
centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by
affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become
a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is