writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and
kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be
singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels,
reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation of baths and theatres, all
things go downward and the state decays." Yet neither he nor that large
body of writers and thinkers who saw the condition towards which the
parasitism of woman was tending to reduce society, preached any adequate
remedy. (Indeed, must not the protest and the remedy in all such cases, if
they are to be of any avail, take their rise within the diseased class
itself?)

Thoughtful men sighed over the present and yearned for the past, nor seem
to have perceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the Roman lady who,
with a hundred servants standing idle about her, should, in imitation of
her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her head to draw water
from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-led streams gushed
forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; that had she insisted on
resuscitating her loom and had sat up all night to spin, she could never
have produced those fabrics which alone her household demanded, and would
have been but a puerile actor; that it was not by attempting to return to
the ancient and for ever closed fields of toil, but by entering upon new,
that she could alone serve her race and retain her own dignity and
virility. That not by bearing water and weaving linen, but by so training
and disciplining herself that she should be fitted to bear her share in the
labour necessary to the just and wise guidance of a great empire, and be
capable of training a race of men adequate to exercise an enlightened,
merciful, and beneficent rule over the vast masses of subject people--that
so, and so only, could she fulfil her duty toward the new society about
her, and bear its burden together with man, as her ancestresses of bygone
generations had borne the burden of theirs.