Whipple, in a recent speech before the Papyrus
Club of Boston, said of George Eliot:

The great masculine creators and delineators of human character,
Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goeethe, Scott, and the rest, cheer
and invigorate us even in the vivid representation of our common
humanity in its meanest, most stupid, most criminal forms. Now
comes a woman endowed not only with their large discourse of
reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate
knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and
brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which
softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick
perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of
life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius
animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it
with hopefulness and joy. I do not intend to solve a problem so
complicated as this, but I would say, as some approach to an
explanation, that this remarkable woman was born under the wrath
and curse of what our modern philosophers call "heredity." She
inherited the results of man's dealings with woman during a
thousand generations of their life together.

Contempt for woman, the result of clerical teaching, is shown in
myriad forms. Wife-beating is still so common, even in America, that a
number of the States have of late introduced bills especially directed
to the punishment of the wife-beater. Great surprise is frequently
shown by these men when arrested. "Is she not my wife?" is cried in
tones proving the brutal husband had been trained to consider this
relationship a sufficient justification for any abuse.

In England, wives are still occasionally led to the market by a halter
around the neck to be sold by the husband to the highest bidder.[220]
George Borrow, in his singular narrative, "The Rommany Rye," says:

The sale of a wife with a halter around her neck is still a legal
transaction in England. The sale must be made in the cattle
market, as if she were a mare, "all women being considered as
mares by old English law, and indeed called 'mares' in certain
counties where genuine old English is still preserved."

It is the boast of America and Europe that woman holds a higher
position in the world of work under Christianity than under pagandom.
Heathen treatment of woma