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XV

MEN’S WIVES.

BITS OF COMMON SENSE AND WISDOM ON A GREAT SUBJECT.

Homely phrases sometimes carry in them a truth which is passed over on account of its frequent repetition, and thus they fail to effect the good they are intended to do.  For instance, there is one with reference to woman, which asserts that she is man’s “better half;” and this is said so often, half in satire and half in jest, that few stop to inquire whether woman really be so.  Yet she is in good truth his better half; and the phrase, met with in French or Latin, looks not only true but poetical, and in its foreign dress is cherished and quoted.  She is not the wiser—­in a worldly sense—­certainly not the stronger, nor the cleverer, notwithstanding what the promoters of the Woman’s Rights movements may say; but she is the better.  All must feel, indeed, that, if the whole sins of the present world could be, and were, parceled into two huge heaps, those committed by the men would far exceed those of the women.  We doubt whether any reflective man will deny this.  On the other hand, the active virtues of man, his benevolence and good deeds, might equal those of woman; but his passive virtues, his patience and his endurance, would be much smaller.  On the whole, therefore, woman is the much better half; and there is no good man but owes an immense deal to the virtues of the good women about him.  He owes, too, a considerable deal of evil to their influence, not only of the absolutely bad, for those a pure man shuns, but the half-good and respectably selfish women of society—­these are they who undermine his honesty, his benevolence, and his purity of mind.

The influence man receives from woman is of a very mixed character.  But of all the influence which woman has over man, that which is naturally most permanent, for good or evil, arises from the marriage tie.  How we of the cold North have been able to emancipate woman from the deplorable depth into which polygamy would place her, it is not easy to say.  That it is a state absolutely countenanced—­nay, enjoined—­in the Old Testament, it would be useless to deny.  But custom and fair usance are stronger than the Old Testament; and the Jews, who readily adopt the laws of the country under which they live, forbid polygamy to their brethren in Christian lands, whilst they permit and practice it where it exists, as with the Mahometan and Hindoo.  Under its influence the character of woman is terribly dwarfed.  She sinks to nothing where she would be, as she should be, of half the importance of life at least.