The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us.  The amazement of that Chinese visitor in Boston, the other day, when he saw a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English visitors when young ladies teach classes in geometry and Latin, in our high schools; the surprise of foreigners at seeing the rough throng in the Cooper Institute reading-room submit to the sway of one young woman with a crochet-needle—­all these simply testify to the fact that the stakes have moved.  That they have yet been carried halfway to the end, who knows?

What a step from the horrible nuptials of those savage days to the poetic marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett—­the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” on one side, the “One Word More” on the other!  But who can say that the whole relation between man and woman reached its climax there, and that where the past has brought changes so vast the future is to add nothing?  Who knows that, when “the world’s great bridals come,” people may not look back with pity, even on this era of the Brownings?  Perhaps even Elizabeth Barrett promised to obey!

At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability of another.  Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from the savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, there is a step forward.  One more step in the spiral line of progress has brought us to the unveiled face and comparatively free movements of the English or American woman.  From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,—­these are far slighter steps than those which gradually lifted the savage girl of Sir John Lubbock’s picture into the possession of the alphabet and the dignity of a home.  So easy are these future changes beside those of the past, that to doubt their possibility is as if Agassiz, after tracing year by year the motion of his Alpine glacier, should deny its power to move one inch farther into the sunny valley, and there to melt harmlessly away.

THE LOW-WATER MARK

We constantly see it assumed, in arguments against any step in the elevation of woman, that her position is a thing fixed permanently by nature, so that there can be in it no great or essential change.  Every successive modification is resisted as “a reform against nature;” and this argument from permanence is always that which appears most convincing to conservative minds.  Let us see how the facts confirm it.

A story is going the rounds of the newspapers in regard to a Russian peasant and his wife.  For some act of disobedience the peasant took the law into his own hands; and his mode of discipline was to tie the poor creature naked to a post in the street, and to call on every passer-by to strike her a blow.  Not satisfied with this, he placed her on the ground, and tied heavy weights on her limbs until one arm was broken.  When finally released, she made a complaint against him in court.  The court discharged him on the ground that he had not exceeded the legal authority of a husband.  Encouraged by this, he caused her to be arrested in return; and the same court sentenced her to another public whipping for disobedience.