valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I
would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand
dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid
that you should laugh at this. William, are these
things phantasms if they make us happy?"

Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to
a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard
Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:

"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have
worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll
kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your
handkerchief."

Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair
sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured
at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.
To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in
perpetual hyperbole:

It's a year almost that I have not seen her;
Oh! last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
--_C.G. Rossetti_.

PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an
entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being
universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among
ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost,
if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we
expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike
times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more
useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,
which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For
these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of
natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior
to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter
was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or
rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts
from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt
for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the
lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of
Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be
fully des