So superior is their skill in handling paper money that they accomplish results that would be utterly unattainable without them. It has been found by long experience that a counterfeit may go through half the banks in the country without being detected, until it comes back, often torn and mutilated, into the hands of the Treasury women. Then it is certain of detection. They shut their eyes and feel of a note if they suspect it. If it feels wrong, in half a minute they point out the incongruities of the counterfeit.
Although throughout the ascending scale of life, the female has been expending all her energy in the performance of her legitimate functions—functions which, as we have seen, are of a higher order than those performed by the male, through causes which will be discussed farther on in these pages, within the later centuries of human existence—she has been temporarily overcome by the destructive forces developed in the opposite sex, forces which are without the line of true development, and which through overstimulation and encouragement have overleaped the bounds of normal activity, and have therefore become disruptive and injurious.
During the past five thousand years, woman’s reproductive functions have been turned into means of subsistence, and under the peculiar circumstances of her environment, her “struggle for existence” has involved physical processes far more disastrous to life and health than are those to which man has been subjected. Owing to the peculiar condition of woman’s environment, there has been developed within her more delicate and sensitive organism an alarming degree of functional nervousness; yet, with the gradual broadening of her sphere of activity, and the greater exercise of personal rights, this tendency to nervous derangement is gradually becoming lessened. That there is reserve force in woman sufficient to overcome the evil results of the supremacy of the animal instincts during the last five thousand or six thousand years of human existence, from present indications seems more than likely.
Commenting on the subject of nervousness, and the degree in which it is manifested in civilized countries, and especially among civilized women, Dr. Beard says: