I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being on another since the world began.
No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is all he has to see with.
“GENTLES, LET US REST!” (A Paper in the _Nation_, 1910.)
A man asked to define the essential characteristics of a gentleman—using the term in its widest sense—would presumably reply: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he himself would recoil; the power to do what seems to him right without fear of what others may say or think.
There is need just now of aid from these principles of gentility in a question of some importance—the future position of women.
The ground facts of difference between the sexes few are likely to deny:
Women are not, and in all probability never will be, physically, as strong as men.
Women are not, and, perhaps, never should be, warriors.
To these ground facts of difference are commonly added, in argument, many others of more debatable character. But it is beside the purpose of this paper to inquire whether women have as much political sense or aptitude as men, whether a woman has ever produced a masterpiece of music, whether the brain of a woman ever weighed as much as the brain of Cuvier or Turgenev.
This paper designs to set forth one cardinal and overmastering consideration, in comparison with which all the other considerations affecting the question seem to this writer but as the little stars to the full moon.