the
tender princess was wont to pierce the hearts of her opponents, while
careering through the battle. And there are abundant instances in which
women have fought side by side with men, and on equal terms. The ancient
British women mingled in the wars of their husbands, and their princesses
were trained to the use of arms in the Maiden's Castle at Edinburgh, in the
Isle of Skye. The Moorish wives and maidens fought in defence of their
European peninsula; and the Portuguese women fought on the same soil,
against the armies of Philip II. The king of Siam has, at present, a
body-guard of four hundred women: they are armed with lance and rifle, are
admirably disciplined, and their commander (appointed after saving the
king's life at a tiger-hunt) ranks as one of the royal family, and has ten
elephants at her service. When the all-conquering Dahomian army marched
upon Abbeokuta, in 1851, they numbered ten thousand men and six thousand
women. The women were, as usual, placed foremost in the assault, as being
most reliable; and of the eighteen hundred bodies left dead before the
walls, the vast majority were of women. The Hospital of the Invalides, in
Paris, has sheltered, for half a century, a fine specimen of a female
soldier, "Lieutenant Madame Bulan," who lived to be more than eighty years
old, had been decorated by Napoleon's own hand with the cross of the
Legion of Honor, and was credited on the hospital books with "seven years'
service, seven campaigns, three wounds, several times distinguished,
especially in Corsica, in defending a fort against the English." But these
cases, though interesting to the historian, are still exceptional; and the
instinctive repugnance they inspire is a condemnation, not of women, but
of war.

The reason, then, for the long subjection of woman has been simply that
humanity was passing through its first epoch, and her full career was to be
reserved for the second. As the different races of man have appeared
successively upon the stage of history, so there has been an order of
succession of the sexes. Woman's appointed era, like that of the Teutonic
races, was delayed, but not omitted. It is not merely true that the empire
of the past has belonged to man, but that it has properly belonged to him;
for it was an empire of the muscles, enlisting, at best, but the lower
powers of the understanding. There can be no question that the present
epoch is initiating an empire of the higher reason, of ar