more victims, even after the legal murderers of the
tribunals grew weary of their hideous task of condemnation.

Not only thus--not only under the influence of excitement and
passion--but in cold blood, there are instances among women of such
ghastly cruelty that men recoil from the contemplation of such deeds.
There is record of a Slavonic countess whose favorite amusement was to
sit in the garden of her country palace, in the rigors of a Russian
winter, while young girls were stripped by her attendants and water
poured slowly over their bodies, thus giving them a death of enduring
agony and providing the countess with new, though unsubstantial, statues
for her grounds. This not more than two centuries ago, and in the
atmosphere of so-termed Christianity. The annals of the Spanish
Inquisition would be ransacked in vain for such ingenuity of torture;
and though the Inquisitors may have grown to love cruelty for its own
sake, they at least alleged reason for their deeds; the Russian countess
frankly sought amusement alone.

Yet in these things there is to be found no general accusation of women.
That cruelty should be carried by them to its extreme, that they should
love it for its own sake, is but the development of extremism, and is
isolated in examples, at least by periods. The Russian countess was not
cruel because she was a woman, but, being cruel of nature, she was the
more so because of her sex. The ladies of imperial Rome did not love the
sight of flowing blood because they were women, but, being women, they
carried their acquired taste to bounds unknown to the less impulsive and
less ardent nature of men.

Yet there comes a question. Is this lust for blood, this love of
cruelty; latent in every woman and but restrained, by the gentler
teachings and promptings of her more developed nature in its highest
presentation? So some psychists would have us believe; but they have
only slight ground for their sweeping assertion. That civilisation is
but restrained savagery may perhaps be conceded; but if the restraint
has grown to be the ever-dominant impulse, then has the savage been
slain. It is not, as some teach, that such isolated idiosyncrasies as we
have considered are glimpses of the tiger that sleeps in every human
heart and sometimes breaks its chain and runs riot. As a rule, these
things are matters of atmosphere. Setting aside such pure isolations as
that of the Russian countess, it will almost invariably be