s elaborately tricked out by our authors in
their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the
world.

V.

As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all
at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the
beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying
something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from
one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to
be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,
as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed
with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and
capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the
best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these
three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them
effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation
of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he
makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of
womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable
of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two
functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection
with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.

Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed
the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on
man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man
of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came
to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,
by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for
the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by
saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a
physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie
too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special
qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their
due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards
and