all we shut them up in convents?
Shall we buy them into Stifts? Shall we send them to Australia? Shall
we put an end to them?" Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers
his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. He knows
there is no short cut to social regeneration, and he will not
recommend one, not even extirpation. He points out that the working
women of Germany have never asked to be on an equality with men. The
lower you descend in the social scale the less sharply women are
differentiated from men, and the worse time women have in consequence.
The wife of a peasant is only his equal in one respect: she works as
hard as he does. Otherwise she is his serf. The sole public position
allowed to a woman in a village is that of gooseherd; while those
original minds who in other circumstances would take to authorship or
painting have to wait, if they are peasants, till they are old, when
they can take to fortune-telling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits
that the lot of women when they are peasants is not a happy one. He
does not make the admission because he thinks it of much consequence,
but because it illustrates his argument that the less "feminine" women
are the less power they exercise. He has no great fault to find with
the peasant's household, where the wife is a beast of burden in the
field and a slave indoors, bears children in quick succession, is old
before her time, and sacrifices herself body and soul to the family.
But he points out that on a higher social plane, where women are more
unlike men, more distinctively feminine, the position they take is
more honourable. Yet it is these same "superfeminine" women who are
foolishly claiming equality with men.

Herr Riehl's views expressed in English seem a little behind the
times, here and there more than a little brutal. He speaks with
sympathy of suttee, and he quotes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval.
This tribe, it seems, "treat their wives with the most exquisite
patriarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a household duty
courtesy ceases (for the _genius_ of the house is more important than
the personal dignity of the wife), and the sinner is castigated (_wird
tuechtig durchgepeitscht_). The whip used, the household sword and
sceptre, is handed down from generation to generation as a sacred
heirloom." I have translated this passage instead of alluding to it,
because I thought it was an occasion on which Herr Riehl should
literal