they numbered ten thousand men and six thousand women; the women were,
as usual, placed foremost in the assault, as being most reliable; and
of the eighteen hundred bodies left dead before the walls, the vast
majority were of women. The Hospital of the Invalides, in Paris, has
sheltered, for half a century, a fine specimen of a female soldier,
"Lieutenant Madame Bulan," now eighty-three years old, decorated by
Napoleon's own hand with the cross of the Legion of Honor, and credited
on the hospital books with "seven years' service,--seven campaigns,--
three wounds,--several times distinguished, especially in Corsica,
in defending a fort against the English." But these cases, though
interesting to the historian, are still exceptional, and the instinctive
repugnance they inspire is condemnatory, not of women, but of war.

The reason, then, for the long subjection of woman has been simply that
humanity was passing through its first epoch, and her full career was to
be reserved for the second. As the different races of man have appeared
successively upon the stage of history, so there has been an order
of succession of the sexes. Woman's appointed era, like that of the
Scandinavian tribes, was delayed, but not omitted. It is not merely
true that the empire of the past has belonged to man, but that it has
properly belonged to him; for it was an empire of the muscles, enlisting
at best but the lower powers of the understanding. There can be no
question that the present epoch is initiating an empire of the higher
reason, of arts, affections, aspirations; and for that epoch the genius
of woman has been reserved. The spirit of the age has always kept pace
with the facts, and outstripped the statutes. Till the fulness of time
came, woman was necessarily kept a slave to the spinning-wheel and the
needle; now higher work is ready, peace has brought invention to her
aid, and the mechanical means for her emancipation are ready also. No
use in releasing her, till man, with his strong arm, had worked out his