our art. It is to this prostitution of love that sex-differences have
carried us.

There is, of course, nothing new in these conditions; and there have
always been times when men have rebelled against this sexual tyranny
of woman. Misogyny is an old story. It is Euripides who betrays to us
the real meaning of such revolt. In a fragment of his we read, _The
most invincible of all things is a woman!_ Men are so little sure of
themselves that they fear suffering from woman an annihilation of
their own personality. There is nothing surprising in this; rather it
is one of Nature's laws that may not be overlooked, traceable back to
that first coalescence when the female cellule absorbs the male. In
one way or another, for Nature's ends or for her own, the female will
always absorb the male--the woman the man; she is the river of life,
he but the tributary stream. Paracelsus long ago gave utterance to the
profound truth, "Woman is nearer to the world than man." Hence the
army of misogynists--a Schopenhauer, a Strindberg, a Weininger, even a
great Tolstoi, alike moved in a rebellion of disillusion, or satiety,
against the power of woman that has been turned into turbid channels
of misusage. Thence, too, the hateful Christian doctrine of the
fundamentally sinful, evil, devilish nature of woman.

This rebellion of men, and their efforts to free themselves from the
thrall of women has been of little avail. We have reached now a new
stage in the age-long conflict of the sexes--the rebellion of the
woman. There has come a time when the old cry, "Woman, what have I to
do with you?" is being changed. It is woman who is whispering to
herself and to her sisters, and, as she gains in courage, crying it
aloud, "Men, what have we to do with you? We belong to ourselves." It
is to this impasse in the confusion and antagonism of the present
moment of transition that sex-differences are bringing us.

In face of this we may well pause.

What to do is another matter. But I am mainly concerned just now in
trying to see facts clearly. And to me it often seems that woman is
in grave danger to-day of becoming intoxicated with herself. She
stands out self-affirming, postulating her own--or what she thinks to
be her own--nature. In her, perhaps too-sudden, awakening to an
entirely new existence of a free personality, an over-consciousness of
her rights has arisen, causing a confusion of her instincts, so she
fails to see the revelation begotten in