a Max O'Rell, we find a considerable part of every rung occupied by
the skirts appropriated to the gentler sex; and--what is, perhaps,
stranger still--she holds her own even in books written by women. It
need not be asserted that all the references to her are equally
agreeable. That amiable critic, Sir Lepel Griffin, alludes to her only
to assure us that "he had never met anyone who had lived long or
travelled much in America who did not hold that female beauty in the
States is extremely rare, while the average of ordinary good looks is
unusually low," and even visitors of an infinitely more subtle and
discriminating type, such as M. Bourget, mingle not a little vinegar
with their syrup of appreciation. But the fact remains that almost
every book on the United States contains a chapter devoted explicitly
to the female citizen; and the inevitableness of the record must have
some solid ground of reason behind or below it. It indicates a vein of
unusual significance, or at the very least of unusual conspicuousness,
in the phenomenon thus treated of. Observers have usually found it
possible to write books on the social and economical traits of other
countries without a parade of petticoats in the head-lines. This is
not to say that one can ignore one-half of society in writing of it;
but if you search the table of contents of such books as Mr. Philip
Hamerton's charming "French and English," or Mr. T.H.S. Escott's
"England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits," you will not find the
words "woman" or "girl," or any equivalent for them. But the writer on
the United States seems irresistibly compelled to give woman all that
coördinate importance which is implied by the prominence of capital
letters and separate chapters.

This predominance of woman in books on America is not by any means a
phase of the "woman question," technically so called. It has no direct
reference to the woman as voter, as doctor, as lawyer, as the