habits as to bathing and exercise.  The great increase of athletic games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls, permitting them to go out more freely in all weathers,—­these are among the permanent gains.  The increased habit of dining late, and of taking only a lunch at noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional and mercantile classes, because it secures time for eating and for digestion.  Even the furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so destructive to the very breath of life, turn out to have given a new lease to it; and open fires are being rapidly reintroduced as a provision for enjoyment and health, when the main body of the house has been tempered by the furnace.  There has been, furthermore, a decided improvement in the bread of the community, and a very general introduction of other farinaceous food.  All this has happened within my own memory, and gives a priori probability to the alleged improvement in physical condition within twenty years.

And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must be remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate when quoted on the other.  If, for instance, all the young people of a New Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not show that the race is dying out because their children swell the birth-rate of Wisconsin instead of New Hampshire.  If in a given city the births among the foreign-born population are twice as many in proportion as among the American, we have not the whole story until we learn whether the deaths are not twice as many also.  If so, the inference is that the same recklessness brought the children into the world and sent them out of it; and no physiological inference whatever can be drawn.  It was clearly established by the medical commission of the Boston Board of Health, a few years ago, that “the general mortality of the foreign element is much greater than that of the native element of our population.”  “This is found to be the case,” they add, “throughout the United States as well as in Boston.”

So far as I can judge, all our physiological tendencies are favorable rather than otherwise:  and the transplantation of the English race seems now likely to end in no deterioration, but in a type more finely organized, and more comprehensive and cosmopolitan; and this without loss of health, of longevity, or of physical size and weight.  And, if this is to hold true, it must be true not only of men, but of women.

THE LIMITATIONS OF SEX

Are there any inevitable limitations of sex?

Some reformers, apparently, think that there are not, and that the best way to help woman is to deny the fact of limitations.  But I think the great majority of reformers would take a different ground, and would say that the two sexes are mutually limited by nature.  They would doubtless add that this very fact is an argument for the enfranchisement of woman:  for, if woman is a mere duplicate of man, man can represent her; but if she has traits of her own, absolutely distinct from his, then he cannot represent her, and she should have a voice and a vote of her own.