ely free movements of the English or American woman.
From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the
lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,--these are far
slighter steps than those which gradually lifted the savage girl of Sir
John Lubbock's picture into the possession of the alphabet and the dignity
of a home. So easy are these future changes beside those of the past, that
to doubt their possibility is as if Agassiz, after tracing year by year the
motion of his Alpine glacier, should deny its power to move one inch
farther into the sunny valley, and there to melt harmlessly away.

THE LOW-WATER MARK

We constantly see it assumed, in arguments against any step in the
elevation of woman, that her position is a thing fixed permanently by
nature, so that there can be in it no great or essential change. Every
successive modification is resisted as "a reform against nature;" and this
argument from permanence is always that which appears most convincing to
conservative minds. Let us see how the facts confirm it.

A story is going the rounds of the newspapers in regard to a Russian
peasant and his wife. For some act of disobedience the peasant took the law
into his own hands; and his mode of discipline was to tie the poor creature
naked to a post in the street, and to call on every passer-by to strike her
a blow. Not satisfied with this, he placed her on the ground, and tied
heavy weights on her limbs until one arm was broken. When finally released,
she made a complaint against him in court. The court discharged him on the
ground that he had not exceeded the legal authority of a husband.
Encouraged by this, he caused her to be arrested in return; and the same
court sentenced her to another public whipping for disobedience.

No authority was given for this story in the newspaper where I saw it; but
it certainly did not first appear in a woman-suffrage newspaper, and
cannot therefore be a manufactured "outrage." I use it simply to illustrate
the low-water mark at which the position of woman may rest, in the largest
Christian nation of the world. All the refinements, all the education, all
the comparative justice, of modern society, have been gradually upheaved
from some such depth as this. When the gypsies described by Leland treat
even the ground trodden upon by a woman as impure, they simply illustrate
the low plane from which all the elevation of woman has begun. All these
things show