and sentimental, to have "his woman" smaller than himself, has
deliberately striven to lower the standard of size in the race. We used
to read in the novels of the last generation, "He was a magnificent
specimen of manhood"--"Her golden head reached scarcely to his
shoulder"--"She was a fairy creature--the tiniest of her sex." Thus we
have mated, and yet expected that by some hocus pocus the boys would all
"take after their father," and the girls, their mother. In his efforts
to improve the breed of other animals, man has never tried to
deliberately cross the large and small and expect to keep up the
standard of size.

As a male he is appealed to by the ultra-feminine, and has given small
thought to effects on the race. He was not designed to do the
selecting. Under his fostering care we have bred a race of women who
are physically weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally
weak enough to pretend they are--and to like it. We have made women who
respond so perfectly to the force which made them, that they attach all
their idea of beauty to those characteristics which attract men;
sometimes humanly ugly without even knowing it.

For instance, our long restriction to house-limits, the heavy
limitations of our clothing, and the heavier ones of traditional
decorum, have made women disproportionately short-legged. This is a
particularly undignified and injurious characteristic, bred in women and
inherited by men, most seen among those races which keep their women
most closely. Yet when one woman escapes the tendency and appears with
a normal length of femur and tibia, a normal height of hip and shoulder,
she is criticized and called awkward by her squatty sisters!

The most convenient proof of the inferiority of women in human beauty is