grasp her by the arm, and almost tear her asunder in the effort to hold her
back. These last are her brothers and her friends; the others are--her
enemies? As you please to call them. They are her future husband and his
kinsmen, who have come to aid him in his wooing.

This was the primitive rite of marriage. Vestiges of it still remain among
savage nations. And all the romance and grace of the most refined modern
marriage--the orange-blossoms, the bridal veil, the church service, the
wedding feast--these are only the "bright consummate flower" reared by
civilization from that rough seed. All the brutal encounter is softened
into this. Nothing remains of the barbarism except the one word "obey," and
even that is going.

Now, to say that a thing is going, is to say that it will presently be
gone. To say that anything is changed, is to say that it is to change
further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a proved
alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite
modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the
discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that
they were moving all the time.

It is the same with the position of woman. Once open your eyes to the fact
that it has changed, and who is to predict where the matter shall end? It
is sheer folly to say, "Her relative position will always be what it has
been," when one glance at Sir John Lubbock's picture shows that there is no
fixed "has been," but that her original position was long since altered and
revised. Those who still use this argument are like those who laughed at
the lines of stakes which Agassiz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840.
But the stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. _Però sim
muove_: "But it moves."