al ability of women.
This quality is noted by Lecky in the chapter on "Woman Questions" in
his _Democracy and Liberty_. He says:

"How many fortunes wasted by negligence or extravagance have
been restored by a long minority under female management?"

He notes, too, the financial ability of the French women.

"Where can we find in a large class a higher level of business
habits and capacity than that which all competent observers have
recognised in French women of the middle classes?"

The estimate of J.S. Mill on this question is too well known to call
for quotation. We may recall also the superior ability in trade of the
women of Burma. It is not necessary, however, to seek for proof of
women's ability in finance. Against one woman who mismanages her
income at least six men may be placed who mismanage theirs, not from
any special extravagance, but from sheer male inability to adapt
expenditure to income. A woman who has had any business training will
discriminate better than a man between the essential and the
non-essential in expenditure.

The civilisation of a people is necessarily determined to a large
extent by the ideas of the relations of the sexes, and by the
institutions and conventions that arise through such ideas. One of the
most important and debatable of these questions is whether women are
to be considered as citizens and independently responsible, or as
beings differing in all their capacities from men, and, therefore, to
be set in positions of at least material dependence to an individual
man. It is the answer to this question we are seeking. The Babylonians
decided for the civic equality of their women, and this decision must
have affected all their actions from the larger matters of the State
down to the smallest points of family conduct. The wisdom which, by
giving a woman full control over her own property, recognised her
right and responsibility to act for herself, was not, as we have seen,
at once established. This recognition of the equality and fellowship
between women and men as the finest working idea for the family
relationship was only developed slowly through the long centuries of
their civilisation.

III.--_In Greece_

"Of all things upon earth that breathe and grow
A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day
To buy us some man's love, and lo, they bring
A master of our flesh. There comes the stin