is one of the surest signs of the political common sense on which we English pride ourselves. George Eliot makes Daniel Deronda say:" "I think that way of arguing against a course because it may be ridden down to an absurdity would soon bring life to a standstill. It is not the logic of human action, but that of a roasting-jack, that must go on to the last turn when it has once been wound up.'

Mrs. Orr seems to me to be peculiarly liable to be run away with by this roasting-jack logic.' She believes that the admission of women to medicine is the winding up of the machine, that it must now go on to the last turn, and that the last turn will literally and positively bring human life to a standstill. If the future is at all like the past history of this movement, every new claim on the part of women will have to be defended on its own merits; and the points of vantage already gained will be useful chiefly in so far as they tend to calm the imaginative horrors which many people think will flow from any new extension of liberty to women.

We cannot say, or if we do, it is no good, Women have the municipal franchise, therefore it necessarily and logically follows that they ought to have the parliamentary franchise.' We have to show what good results we believe would accrue not only to women, but to the whole community, from the granting to women of this new privilege; and we can point to the experience gained of the results of their admission to the other franchises as showing that women can vote for town councillors, and can both vote for, and sit on, school boards, without ceasing to love their children or throwing every vestige of feminine propriety to the winds.

Mrs. Orr expresses the opinion that instead of striving to gain entrance to educational privileges and learned professions which have hitherto been the exclusive field of masculine enterprise, it would be a wiser ambition on the part of women to reconquer their own sphere,' and apply themselves vigorously to the better performance of household work. It will occur to many readers that this 'reconquering of their own sphere' has been going on simultaneously with other movements to open to women what has hitherto been the sphere of men. Mrs. Orr admits the significance of the new-born zeal for needlework and cookery: it is not perhaps a too rash presumption to say that it has arisen mainly as an offshoot of the 'women's rights' movement. The standard of women's work has been raised all round. The idea of the beauty of good work, in whatever sphere, has found its way into women's minds, and they are applying it to needlework and cookery as fast as possible. They no longer regard the fact that a certain bit of work has been done by a woman as a satisfactory reason for its being a slovenly performance.

When Mrs. Orr says 'Let women reconquer their own sphere, and implies that they should devote themselves to housekeeping, and let doctoring and other masculine occupations alone, I think she does

not sufficiently consider the individual cases of the women who want remunerative work. Take as an example the case of a family consisting of a father and mother and half-a-dozen daughters. The father is a professional man, two-thirds of whose income cease at his death; the mother is an active woman, and, at the time when the youngest of her daughters reaches the age of eighteen, still a vigorous housekeeper. Three of the daughters marry; one remains at home to help her mother in the management of the household. What are the others to do? How does Mrs. Orr's suggestion of reconquering their own sphere' help them? Their own home is orderly and well governed. It is true that they may have neighbours and acquaintances whose homes are quite the reverse; but it is in their own home, or in none at all, that this reconquering of their own sphere' must take place. They cannot say to a friend, nor even to an enemy: 'My dear Mrs. Jellaby, I am quite distressed at the disorder of your household; I will come and put your whole establishment on a totally different footing.' What generally happens in real life is that all three unmarried daughters stay at home with practically no real or sufficient occupation; they spend their time making their dresses, and endeavouring, by snipping and altering and turning, always to be in the latest fashion, and to make the 30l. a-year or so which they have for dress and pocket-money go as far as 35l. or 40l. This, it appears to me, is an unhealthy and unnatural existence; why should the labour of three fine, strong, active young women produce such an insignificant result? Further, they are apt to present, as time goes on, the unlovely spectacle of middle-aged spinsters aping the appearance and manners of girls of eighteen. They are eagerly and perhaps vainly hoping for marriage, which would give them a reasonable occupation and work worth doing. They are not prepared, as the Saturday Review says, 'to judge calmly of an offer when it comes.' This state of things is surely not at all conducive to the realisation of a high ideal of marriage. Let us now suppose what would have happened if these two young women had had an ambition to find some career for themselves more satisfactory than that of a third-rate dressmaker. One goes to Girton or Newnham, and thus, by getting a university training, prepares herself for the profession of teaching, and in a few years she may be earning 200l., 300l., or 400l. a-year. The other goes to the school of medicine for women; and after the proper course has been gone through and the examinations passed, she begins practice: if she has anything like a real faculty for her profession, her income will very speedily outstrip her sister's; and, moreover, she too will have found a work worthy of a rational human being-a work that calls out some of the best and noblest qualities. If either of these sisters marries after she is established in her profession, it will not be for the sake of escaping from ▲ ▲ 2

the ennui of perpetual young-ladyhood. It will not be because in no other way could she find useful work to do in the world: the chances of the marriage being happy will be improved by the fact that it was a real choice, and not a Hobson's choice, such as marriage is when other careers of usefulness are closed.

So far as present experience goes, look where one will for it, there is no evidence in support of Mrs. Orr's assertion that such careers as those I have sketched will tend to dry up the capacity of love either in men or women. It is to be inferred that Mrs. Orr does not expect to see any sign of this catastrophe at present; the judgment is yet to come. If any one is now suffering from anxiety on the subject, a glance over the Registrar-General's returns would suffice to reassure him. In estimating the probable increase of population since 1871, that official has apparently taken no cognisance of the growing importance of the women's movement. 1881 may have terrible things to reveal, but at present we cannot by any possibility conjure up the smallest alarm that Mrs. Orr's prophecy will be fulfilled either at the next census or in that of 1981. The constitution of the human character, with its mysterious affections and aspirations, is planted on too firm a foundation to be 'decomposed' or turned over by the granting of more liberty to women, who after all are only a little behind their brothers in asking for it. Those who write and speak against the extension of liberty of action and conscience to men or women have always said that the change they deprecate will undermine or decompose the foundations of society. A few years pass by, the change is accomplished, and it turns out that society is not undermined or decomposed at all, but is all the healthier and more vigorous, through being possessed of a larger proportion of free citizens. The foundations of society' are really stronger than the enemies of progress suppose; if they were not, the undermining and decomposing would have been effected long ago. It is rather irreverent perhaps, but I always feel when I hear that society will be undermined by the ballot or by household suffrage, or in. France by the establishment of a Republic, that if society is in such a very delicate state, the sooner it is undermined and something stronger put in its place the better it will be. In Mr. Leslie Stephen's new Life of Dr. Johnson he tells how Johnson'snorted contempt when Taylor talked of breaking some small vessels if he took an emetic. "Bah!" said the doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a "scoundrel," "if you have so many things that will break, you had better break your neck at once, and there's an end on't." If the foundations of society are not strong enough to bear the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women and the opening to them of various professional careers, many will think that there had better be an end on't' at once. But it must be confessed that society is wronged by its would-be defenders; it is strong and vigorous still; and if it sometimes has 'growing pains,' these, after all, are only

9

signs that it is still in its youth, and that the period of gradual decay has not yet set in.

I would only say in conclusion that I have purposely selected for comment those parts of Mrs. Orr's article with which I disagree: there are some parts with which I agree, and some few with which I neither agree nor disagree, because I cannot understand them. I have been reluctant to waste the time of possible readers in going over ground where I have nothing but agreement to record, and still more unwilling to comment on passages of which I cannot be sure that I understand the drift. The selection that I have made has unfortunately left me little choice but to assume a tone of hostile criticism throughout. This does not, however, truly represent my feeling towards the whole of the article. I have written as I have done because I felt it right, as a hearty sympathiser with every effort now being made to obtain a larger and a freer life for women, to show, if I could, that the way we are going is not the road to ruin that Mrs. Orr thinks it-that the whole of our aim is to hasten the time when every woman shall have the opportunity of becoming the best that her natural faculties make her capable of. In one of Oliver Cromwell's letters, he says: "It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition that he might abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.' So I would ask that women should be judged by their use of the liberty they at present enjoy, and not by imaginary abuses of liberty of which at present the world has had no experience.

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.

SOME PHASES OF EARLY RELIGIOUS

DEVELOPMENT.

IN the opening book of Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles, which is devoted to the purpose of reconciling Science and Religion, we find what we may look upon as a definition of the latter word. The definition stands as follows:

:-

Leaving out (says the writer) the accompanying moral code, which is in all cases a supplementary growth, a religious creed is definable as an à priori theory of the Universe. The surrounding facts being given, some form of agency is alleged which, in the opinion of those alleging it, accounts for the facts. . . . However widely different speculators may disagree in the solution which they give of the same problem; yet by implication they all agree there is a problem to be solved. Here then is an element which all creeds have in common. Religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all that surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation. On this point, if on no other, there is entire unanimity.2

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By the very nature of words the element which is common to all religions alike must be that to which they owe their common name. We have no difficulty in gathering from the above sentence that this common element is the conviction that the existence of the world, with all it contains and all that surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation.' The writer, moreover, in his first sentence indicates an occasional adjunct not belonging to the essential character of religion, the moral code which is in all cases a supplementary growth.' Let us now turn from Mr. Spencer to another definition of religion to be found in Mr. Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma,3 where we are told that

6

Religion, if we follow the intention of human thought and human language in the use of the word, is ethics, heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied emotion, and the true meaning of religion is not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Lastly, let us take a third definition of religion from Mr. Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language:*

This paper was in the hands of the printer before the delivery of any of Professor Max Müller's recent lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion.-ED.

2 First Principles, 3rd ed. pp. 43, 44.

9 Pp. 20, 21.

Second series, p. 436.