ts, while woman needs the 'finishing schools' and the
'accomplishments;' and that, to sum up, the character, work, training
and position of women are as good as they ever can be.

"The truths in this theory have covered its errors. The truth that woman
is the help-meet of man has practically led to her education in such a
way that half her power to aid, and counsel, and comfort is taken away.

"The result has been that strong men, in adversity or perplexity, have
often found that the 'partners of their joys and sorrows' give no more
real strength than would Nuremberg dolls. Under this theory, as thus
worked out, the aid, and counsel, and solace fail just when they are
most needed. In their stead, the man is likely to find some scraps of
philosophy, begun in boarding-schools, and developed in kitchens or
drawing-rooms.

"But to see how a truly educated woman, nourished on the same thoughts
of the best thinkers on which man is nourished, can give aid and counsel
and solace, while fulfilling every duty of the household, we are happily
able to appeal to the experience of many; and for the noblest portrayal
of this experience ever made we may name the dedication to the wife of
John Stuart Mill of her husband's greatest essay.

"But if we look out from the wants of the individual man into the wants
of the world at large, we find that this optimist theory regarding woman
is not supported by facts, and that the resulting theory of woman's
education aggravates some of the worst evils of modern society. One of
these is conventional extravagance.

"Among the curiosities of recent civilization, perhaps the most absurd
is the vast tax laid upon all nations at the whim of a knot of the least
respectable women in the most debauched capital in the world. The fact
may be laughed at, but it is none the less a fact, that to meet the
extravagances of the world of women who bow to the decrees of the Breda
quarter of Paris, young men in vast numbers, especially in our cities
and large towns, are harnessed to work as otherwise they would not be;
their best aspirations thwarted, their noblest ambitions sacrificed, to
enable the 'partners of their joys and sorrows' to vie with each other
in reproducing the last grotesque absurdity issued from the precincts of
_Notre Dame de Lorette_, or to satisfy other caprices not less ignoble.

"The main hope for the abatement of this nuisance, which is fast
assuming the proportions of a curse, is not i