ately: "This power [it matters not what] would be
about equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, which
turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the
surroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed in
her a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances have
required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely
enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day.
But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a
slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the
ignorance of women.

And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in their
common heritage. It is Cassius who speaks:

"Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?"

And Brutus who replies:

"Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus
He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."

Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:

"If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find
A soul so charming from a stock so good.
Thy father was transfused into thy blood."

The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there
have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that
were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains
were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the
other. But while the victories were once going forward in the
playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some
other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a
playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were
sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.

This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on
a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at
her back. All the things on the near side of the street--the things
going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking
and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages,
cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried
them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight
line right across Oxford Street into the street oppo