It was after all something to step forward and enact a piece of history in the garb of such persons. There was something solemn about it as he had felt before in the church. After he had gone on the stage and made his speech he went away firmly resolved to bear all on behalf of sacred art.
He had thus taken the decisive step. To his father he had written a high-flown letter, and declared that he would either become something great in the career which he had now entered or would retire from it altogether; he had resolved not to go home till he had succeeded. The doctor was sorry but made no fuss, for he saw it was impossible to stop him. But he had other secret plans for saving him which he now began to set in motion. In the first place he induced John to translate one or two medical pamphlets for which he had found a publisher. Now he came with a proposal that they should together write articles for the _Aftonbladet (Evening New's_). John for his part had translated Schiller's essay, _The Theatre Regarded as a Moral Institution_, and as the subject of the theatre had now conic up in the Reichstag the doctor wrote an introduction to it in which he seriously expostulated with the Agrarian party on their indifference to culture. The whole article was inserted. Another day the doctor came with a member of the medical journal, the _Lancet_, which treated of the question whether women were fit for a medical career. Without hesitation and instinctively John decided against it. He had an indescribable reverence for women as woman, mother and wife, but as a matter of fact, society was founded upon the man regarded as provider for the family, and upon the woman as wife and mother; thus man had a full right to his work-market and all the duties involved in it. Every occupation taken from the man would mean a marriage less or one more overworked family-provider, for the impulse to marry was so strong in men that they would not cease to marry, however great the difficulties in which they might become involved. Moreover women had abundant opportunities of work; they could become servants, house-keepers, governesses, teachers, midwives, seamstresses, actresses, artists, authoresses, queens, empresses, besides wives and mothers. Many of these vocations were also open to the unmarried. Anything more than this was an encroachment on the man's territory. If the woman did that, the man should be free from the cares of providing for the family, and inquiries after paternity should not be made. But society would not consent to that. On the contrary it began to persecute the prostitutes by way of forcing men to marry. Once caught in the snares of the married women's property law, they would sink to the level of domestic slaves.