All this might, perhaps, be overcome, if the social prejudice which discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the discouragement.  The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not.  Women being denied, not merely the training which prepares for great deeds, but the praise and compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions.  The career of eminent men ordinarily begins with college and the memories of Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame:  woman begins under discouragement, and ends beneath the same.  Single, she works with half preparation and half pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping of her husband, shrinks into John Smith’s “lady” during life, and John Smith’s “relict” on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman’s claims—­those who hold that “the virtues of the man and the woman are the same,” with Antisthenes, or that “the talent of the man and the woman is the same,” with Socrates in Xenophon’s “Banquet”—­must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.  Of course, if women know as much as the men, without schools and colleges, there is no need of admitting them to those institutions.  If they work as well on half pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other half.  The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.  Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.  It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports that she herself invented all three.  In the same way it may be shown that the departments in which women have equalled men have been the departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement, and equal compensation; as, for instance, the theatre.  Madame Lagrange, the prima donna, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm, sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling expenses for ten persons, country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of bracelets, bouquets, and billets-doux. Of course, every young debutante fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a brief stage-vista between.  On the stage there is no deduction for sex, and, therefore, woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius.  But every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been obstructed for her, and smoothed