ation, in which he rolled up to the office on his
stomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not have
developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is
walks upright; and that woman is something almost more upright than
uprightness.

And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women
(nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble
lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second
reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these
peculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them; nor does
she. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which
mankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and the
art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the
ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those
formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded
in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage
countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated
their women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons
barbaric; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these
people's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as
ours. Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across
an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is
playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of
creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might
see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because
women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are
at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be
in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work
because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the
woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. I
do not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have
too little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it
is untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface
science, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find
all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects
some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from
him. The professor then pompousl