It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race—­or, if not indignity, provincialism—­in the more extremely Oriental people, that a Japanese woman carries her child on her back and not upon her arm.  It is a charming infant, and the mother looks no more than a gentle child; with the little creature bound to her back she carries a soft lantern in a mild blue night.  She is not of a classic race, and she shuffles on her subordinate way, an irresponsible creature, who must not proffer opinions except by way of quotation, and is scarcely of the inches that measure the landscape or of the aspect that fronts the sky.

But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bear the ignobler burden?  It is not long since an American woman wrote a book, Women and Economics, urging equal labour upon women, by the analogy of animals that know no distinction between a strong sex and a weak, nor between a free sex and one confined to the pen, or the lair, or the cover, by the care of little ones.  The reply seems too obvious that the children of men are more helpless, and are helpless for a longer time, even in proportion to their longer life, than the off-spring of other living creatures.  The children of men have to be carried.  This author complains that women are economically dependent upon men; and she finds that the world has “misty ideas upon the subject.”  If those misty ideas are to the effect that a woman who keeps house for the service of herself, her husband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return for maintenance, and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish that ideas “mistily” held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed were often so well founded.  Those who charge the husband with “employing” his wife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess, as well as “servant” or “housekeeper,” ministering to herself and to the guests in whose company she has pleasure, and to whose respect she has a right.  Our economic author proceeds:  “We are the only animal species in which the sex relation is also an economic factor. . .  We have not been accustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization that it was ‘natural,’ and that other animals did so too.”  Has anyone really been so rash as to aver “that other animals did so too”?  The obvious truth is that other animals do otherwise, but that, whatever they do, they make no rule or example for man.  Again:  “Whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it.  The women who do the most work get the least money.”  And yet but now they were charged with “getting it” too dependently, or rather, with having it “got” for them by man!  Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word “money,” which she here lets slip?

“He nearly persuades me to go on all fours,” sighs Voltaire rising—­rising erect reluctantly, one may almost say—­from the reading of Rousseau.

THE UNREADY