made to centre
round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot
exist without one another.

Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual
and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to
go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence
led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of
convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily
conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if
he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his
pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Mueller's idea of the
Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it
and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the
advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength
between the two halves of society.

A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution
of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was
inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of
labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as
civilization has increased with the growth of population and of
industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the
social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still
maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman,
and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural
wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to
think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer
distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.

The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have
encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one
generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry
of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own
necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous
difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer
classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the
impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter
the labor-market thems