so quickly incenses the people as any insult offered to a woman.  Wife-beating, and indeed any kind of rough violence offered to women, is far less common among the rudest class than it is in England.  Field work or work at the pit-mouth of mines is seldom or never done by women in America; and the American traveler who in some parts of Europe finds women performing severe manual labor, is revolted by the sight in a way which Europeans find surprising.

In the farther West, that is to say, beyond the Mississippi, in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific States, one is much struck by what seems the absence of the humblest class of women.  The trains are full of poorly dressed and sometimes (though less frequently) rough-mannered men.  One discovers no women whose dress or air marks them out as the wives, daughters, or sisters of these men, and wonders whether the male population is celibate, and if so, why there are so many women.  Closer observation shows that the wives, daughters, and sisters are there, only their attire and manner are those of what Europeans would call middle-class and not working-class people.  This is partly due to the fact that Western men affect a rough dress.  Still one may say that the remark so often made, that the masses of the American people correspond to the middle class of Europe, is more true of the women than of the men; and is more true of them, in the rural districts and in the West than it is of the inhabitants of Atlantic cities.  I remember to have been dawdling in a book-store in a small town in Oregon when a lady entered to inquire if a monthly magazine, whose name was unknown to me, had yet arrived.  When she was gone I asked the salesman who she was, and what was the periodical she wanted.  He answered that she was the wife of a railway workman, that the magazine was a journal of fashions, and that the demand for such journals was large and constant among women of the wage-earning class in the town.  This set me to observing female dress more closely; and it turned out to be perfectly true that the women in these little towns were following the Parisian fashions very closely, and were in fact ahead of the majority of English ladies belonging to the professional and mercantile classes.  Of course in such a town as I refer to, there are no domestic servants except in the hotels (indeed, almost the only domestic service to be had in the Pacific States was till very recently that of Chinese), so these votaries of fashion did all their own housework and looked after their own babies.

Three causes combine to create among American women an average of literary taste and influence higher than that of women in any European country.  These are the educational facilities they enjoy, the recognition of the equality of the sexes in the whole social and intellectual sphere, and the leisure which they possess as compared with men.  In a country where men are incessantly occupied at their business or profession,