son the same credit at the beginning of the year, and afterward simply recording the withdrawals without calculations of interest or other incidents whatever. In fact, Mr. West, so simple and invariable are the conditions that the accounts are kept automatically by a machine, the accountant merely playing on a keyboard." "But I understand that every citizen has a record kept also of his services as the basis of grading and regrading." "Certainly, and a most minute one, with most careful guards against error or unfairness. But it is a record having none of the complications of one of your money or wages accounts for work done, but is rather like the simple honor records of your educational institutions by which the ranking of the students was determined." "But the citizen also has relations with the public stores from which he supplies his needs?" "Certainly, but not a relation of account. As your people would have said, all purchases are for cash onlythat is, on the credit card." “There remains,” I persisted, "the accounting for goods and services between the stores and the productive departments and between the several departments." "Certainly; but the whole system being under one head and all the parts working together with no friction, and no motive for any indirection, such accounting is child's work compared with the adjustment of dealings between the mutually suspicious private capitalists, who divided among themselves the field of business in your day, and sat up nights devising tricks to deceive, defeat, and overreach one another." "But how about the elaborate statistics on which you base the calculations that guide production? There at least is need of a good deal of figuring." "Your national and state governments,” replied Mr. Chapin, "published annually great masses of similar statistics, which, while often very inaccu of rate, must have cost far more trouble to accumulate, seeing that they involved an unwelcome inquisition into the affairs of private persons instead of a mere collection of reports from the books of different departments of one great business. Forecasts probable consumption every manufacturer, merchant, and storekeeper had to make in your day and mistakes meant ruin. Nevertheless, he could but guess, because he had no sufficient data. Given the complete data that we have, and a forecast is as much increased in certainty as it is simplified in difficulty." "Kindly spare me any further demonstration of the stupidity of my criticism." "Dear me, Mr. West, there is no question of stupidity. A wholly new system of things always impresses the mind at first sight with an effect of complexity, although it may be found on examination to be simplicity itself. But please do not stop me just yet, for I have told you only one side of the matter. I have shown you how few and simple are the accounts we keep compared with those in corresponding relations kept by you; but the biggest part of the subject is the accounts you had to keep which we do not keep at all. Debit and credit are no longer known; interest, rents, profits, and all the calculations based on them no more have any place in human affairs. In your day everybody, besides his account with the state, was involved in a network of accounts with all about him. Even the humblest wage-earner was on the books of half-a-dozen tradesmen, while a man of substance might be down in scores or hundreds, and this without speaking of men not engaged in commerce. A fairly nimble dollar had to be set down so many times in so many places, as it went from hand to hand, that we calculate in about five years it must have cost itself in ink, paper, pens, and clerk hire, let alone fret and worry. All these forms of private and business accounts have now been done away with. Nobody owes anybody, or is owed by anybody, or has any contract with any- "Tis woman that seduces all mankind: By her we first were taught the wheedling body, or any account of any sort with anybody, but is simply beholden to everybody for such kindly regard as his virtues may attract." From "Equality" by Edward Bellamy. Copyright by D. Appleton & Co. Price $1.25. THE DISPARAGEMENT OF WOMEN IN LITERATURE. Early in the seventeenth century we find the author of that immortal little classic, the "Religio Medici," out-Heroding Herod in his scorn of women. "The whole world," says Sir Thomas Brown, "was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman. Man is the whole world and the breath of God: woman the rib and crooked piece of man." And George Herbert, genuine saint, high-bred gentleman and enchanting poet, includes, about the same time in his "Jacula Prudentum" the disparaging aphorism: "Words are women: deeds are men:" a saying, by the way, which has many variants in different writers and countries. Later in the century Otway makes one say in "The Orphan:" What mighty ills have not been done by woman? Who was't betrayed the Capital? A woman! Who lost Mark Anthony the world? A woman! Who was the cause of a long ten-years' war, And laid at last old Troy in ashes? Woman! Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman! Pope's epigrammatic sneers are almost too hackneyed to bear quotation, but two of them may be recalled. arts. "Sir," remarked Dr. Johnson, with, as it seems to us to-day, a singular lapse of the penetrative insight characteristic of him, on hearing that Boswell had to "a meeting of the people called Quakers:" "a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." At another time the sage thus delivered himself in the presence of a company including several ladies: "A lady will take Jonathan Wild as readily as St. Austin, if he has threepence more: and, what is worse, her parents will give her to him. Women have a perpetual envy of our vices: they are less vicious than we, not from choice, but because we restrict them: they are the slaves of order and fashion." Among Byron's gibes, one only need be given from "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers':"— Believe a woman, or an epitaph, And one from Moore: Friend of my soul! this goblet sip, "Twill chase that pensive tear: 'Tis not so sweet as woman's lip, But oh, 'tis more sincere. Like her delusive beam, "Twill steal away thy mind: But like affection's dream It leaves no sting behind. Scott was not freer from the prevalent disease than other people. A chance dip into the first of his novels Men some to business, some to pleasure that came to hand,-"Kenilworth"-re take, But every woman is at heart a rake. Woman's at best a contradiction still. sulted in the almost instantaneous discovery of the subjoined passage. The speaker is Giles Gosling, the landlord of the Black Bear at Cumnor, a "good Gay in the "Beggar's Opera," runs fellow," and a man of probity and inhim close. tegrity. "Be not so rash, good sir," he admonishes Tressilian, "and cast not yourself away because a woman-to be brief-is a woman, and changes her lovers like her suit of ribands, with no better reason than mere fantasy.” Hurrying on to our own day, we are, of course, overwhelmed by the mass of material at our disposal. Let us glance at two novelists only out of the modern throng, not because they are offenders more than others, but from simple motives of convenience. Being a devoted admirer of what, for me, is perhaps the most delightful romance of our time, Mr. Blackmore's "Lorna Doone," the book is often in my hand and in my thoughts. Unhappily, it is disfigured throughout by what I can only call an incessant series of backhanded blows aimed at women-little parenthetical, perfectly good-humored hits, which, however, do not hurt the less that they are delivered with no more malice than could lurk in the composition of honest, true-hearted, gigantic John Ridd. Turning to my "Lorna Doone" for the purpose of this essay, I remarked to a friend that I had very little doubt of finding a passage appropriate for quotation on the very first page my eye chanced to light upon. When, entirely at haphazard, it did light on the middle of the first page of the thirtieth chapter, I could not but feel that my quarrel with a favorite author had received fresh and rather striking justification. Here is the passage in question: "But women, who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy." "But when I told Lorna-whom I could trust in any matter of secrecy, as if she had never been a woman”""I do not understand,' I said, falling back with bewilderment: 'all women are such liars.'" Is it fanciful to suppose that the everrecurring burden of scorn and dispraise of woman in this one book alone, however playful and paternally indulgent, may have had an appreciable effect In hindering her moral and spiritual progress? Mr. Blackmore's fascinating story, unsurpassed for poetry, purity, and quaint, romantic charm, has recently, I believe, gone into a forty-second edition. It has been calculated that it has had a circulation, in England alone, of about half-a-million copies, and when we add its American and colonial readers to its British ones, we are confronted with a goodly company indeed. Have no women and girls amongst them been pained and humiliated, damped in spirit numbed in effort by its attitude toward their sex? Have no men and boys been strengthened by it in their contempt for women-at least in their mental aloofness from them, and inveterate habit of regarding them as a separate, if not inferior race? and Of this practice women themselves are not infrequently guilty. It is infectious; it is inevitable; it is one of the accepted conventions of the literary art, We all do it, or we all have done it. I have not the slightest doubt that in the times of my ignorance I did it A very few other examples must suf- myself. Taking up the last woman's fice. book I have been reading, "Guenn," by Blanche Willis Howard, I find the following: "So madame, being granted wisdom beyond most of her sex, deplored the situation, but held her peace and went her way, never worrying or alienating Guenn with anxious advice." Enough, I trust, has been said, to demonstrate the need for eradicating the habit-at least in so far as it has really dwindled to a meaningless survival of disparaging women in literature. fare. break themselves of the conventional trick of decrying woman-as woman— a great forward step would surely be Where a writer's genuine belief is in- achieved in human happiness and welvolved; where he has honestly convinced himself of the inferiority and ineptitude of half the human race, and records his opinion advisedly, the case is altered, and we should be able to respect his sincerity, while we deprecate his error. But even such a writer would do well to reflect that there are sus I respect those persons of whom I have heard, who, in reading standard works, or for the matter of that, current literature, aloud in the family clrcle, are careful to omit all depreciatory references to the female sex, as a sex; regarding them as being demoralizing to boys and girls alike, and as little tolerable to-day as the oaths, the grossness, or the blasphemy of less enlight ened ages. Such a practice might gain adherence among parents and teachers with infinite advantage to their charges; and many other methods combating the evil will suggest themselves to those who appreciate its magnitude sufficiently to grapple with it seriously. of Think for a moment of the place in our affections and in our homes occupied by one prominent paper alone—our leading comic paper. And think how different would have been the view taken in English society at this moment of the woman of serious aims and high ideals, if she had ever for one instant been referred to in its pages otherwise than with derision. Its houorable traditions have been for generations so sane, so generous, so catholic, so humane, that the humblest creature, it might be thought, would not look in vain for justice at its hands. Alas! the woman who loves knowledge, who loves wisdom, who loves her kind, and desires to take her humble share in the universal effort of all good men, to leave the world a little better than they find it, is perhaps the only sentient being for whom it has no mercy, but only the most poignant shafts of its satire, the keenest edge of its ridicule. Let her be as gentle and womanly as she will (and if she is worth anything at all, she does will); let her be the light of her home, and the joy of the hearts nearest to her (if she is of the right temper, she will make it her primary aim to be both); let her be attractive, and sweet, and comely-nay, let her be beautiful—it is all one-in an organ which takes thought for the poor; which champions the down-trodden; which has always a tender word to spare for the sweated seamstress, a pitying one for the "horse o'er-driven" she sees herself mirrored as harsh and sour and prudish and physically repulsive—a gaunt, ill-dressed, sexless monster, pour rire. Here it is invariably our poor Sonya's ugly hat and unfashionable frock that are thrust into prominence, and never a glimpse do we catch of the soul in her eyes, or the hunger in her heart, or the power to add to the sun of human achievement in her brain. Is it And if the writers of novels and of belles lettres generally, and the feeders of the great daily, weekly, and monthly torrent of printed matter that furnishes us with so much delight, diversion, and information, would gradually, as their eyes become opened, vain to point out that such a handling cause they strove for some political purpose which they sincerely believed to be genuine, honest, and beneficent. In the debate on the address to which we have been referring an immense impression was undoubtedly created House of Comin all parts of the of the woman who has other interests ter have passed years of suffering bethan the study of fashion-plates and the interchange of "feline amenities" is anachronistic as well as unjust? Is it useless to entreat from a journal which is a power in our midst, as well as a perennial pleasure, a tardy recognition of the difference between the real, salutary woman-movement, and the froth and scum that gather on the crest of that steadily-advancing wave? From "Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction, and Other Essays." By Elizabeth Rachei Chapman. John Lane, Publisher. ENGLISH mons of by the speech of Mr. Michael Mr. Michael Davitt was 2 Davitt. man absolutely blameless in private character. As a London newspaper not committed to Irish ideas said him, he was a man in whom the whole Irish race at home and abroad felt a just pride. He was in his youth concerned in the Fenian movement, and he was sentenced to a long term of im. TREATMENT OF POLITICAL prisonment. In the House of Com PRISONERS. we mons he mentioned the fact that while The debate on the release of the dy- he was in Portland Prison it had been namiter prisoners in the House of part of his work to be harnessed daily Commons brought up once again, and to a cart, as if he were a mule or а directly, for public consideration two horse, and to drag stones this way and questions, at least, which had for a that for hour after hour, and that he long time been discussed in the news- had to sleep in a cell which only barely papers and on the platform, and by the allowed him room to lie down. His public generally. The first question words told on the House of Commons, was, whether there ought to be a dif- which, to do it justice, is one of the ferent system of treatment with regard fairest political assemblies in the to political offenders, and what world, and in which no member of any may call private offenders. The sec- party felt anything but respect for Mr. ond question was, whether the whole Davitt. The question then naturally system of prison discipline in these arose, whether a man like Mr. Davitt countries did not require some modifi- ought to have been treated in that cation and some improvement. Now, fashion; and, of course, with that with regard to the first question, as to doubt came the inquiry whether politiwhether political offenders ought to be cal offenders ought not to be treated on treated on different conditions from a different principle from the ordinary private offenders, it seems to us that criminal offenders. No matter whether there can be no reasonable difference a man is right or wrong in his opinions, of opinion whatever, if men will but and in his way of carrying them into calmly think the subject over. Some action, is there to be no difference of the greatest and noblest of English- made between the man who moves men were put to death as political of- only on some personal and selfish purfenders. Some of the greatest pose and passion, and the man who is and noblest of Englishmen were moving only for a cause or a principle tortured before death as political out of which he can obtain, and out of offenders. Some of the Englishmen which he wants to obtain, no personal whose names are most revered and are gain whatever? Is Lord William Rusmost enshrined in the affection of En- sell, is Theobald Wolfe Tone, exactly gland were tortured and put to death on a level with Bill Sykes and Jack the as political offenders. In modern Ripper, whoever that mysterious pertimes, it is quite certain that men oth- son may have been? An American erwise of the most stainless charac- once said to the writer of these vol |