of a weak pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long
walks; or the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his
wife is constitutionally unfitted to understand business.

It is a pity to praise either sex at the expense of the other. The social
inequality of the sexes was not produced so much by the voluntary tyranny
of man, as by his great practical advantage at the outset; human history
necessarily beginning with a period when physical strength
was sole ruler. It is unnecessary, too, to consider in how many cases women
may have justified this distrust; and may have made themselves as obnoxious
as Horace Walpole's maids of honor, whose coachman left his savings to his
son on condition that he should never marry a maid of honor. But it is safe
to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt for women, and the love to
exercise arbitrary power over them, is the survival of a crude impulse
which the world is outgrowing, and which is in general least obvious in the
manliest men. That clear and able English writer, Walter Bagehot, well
describes "the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks
early society. The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the
ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have
now marvellous means of winning their way in the world; and mind without
muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind." [1]

[Footnote 1: _Physics and Politics_, p. 79.]




THE NOBLE SEX