assistance.  It does not matter that this sacrifice is not in the shape of incense burning or of temple offerings; nor does it matter that the prayers are of a different kind from those pronounced in churches.  There is sacrifice and worship.  And no saying is more common, no truth better known, than that the man who hopes to succeed in life must be able to please the women.  Every young man who goes into any kind of society knows this.  It is one of the first lessons that he has to learn.  Well, am I very wrong in saying that the attitude of men towards women in the West is much like the attitude of men towards gods?

But you may answer at once,—­How comes it, if women are thus reverenced as you say, that men of the lower classes beat and ill-treat their wives in those countries?  I must reply, for the same reason that Italian and Spanish sailors will beat and abuse the images of the saints and virgins to whom they pray, when their prayer is not granted.  It is quite possible to worship an image sincerely and to seek vengeance upon it in a moment of anger.  The one feeling does not exclude the other.  What in the higher classes may be a religion, in the lower classes may be only a superstition, and strange contradictions exist, side by side, in all forms of superstition.  Certainly the Western working man or peasant does not think about his wife or his neighbour’s wife in the reverential way that the man of the superior class does.  But you will find, if you talk to them, that something of the reverential idea is there; it is there at least during their best moments.

Now there is a certain exaggeration in what I have said.  But that is only because of the somewhat narrow way in which I have tried to express a truth.  I am anxious to give you the idea that throughout the West there exists, though with a difference according to class and culture, a sentiment about women quite as reverential as a sentiment of religion.  This is true; and not to understand it, is not to understand Western literature.

How did it come into existence?  Through many causes, some of which are so old that we can not know anything about them.  This feeling did not belong to the Greek and Roman civilization but it belonged to the life of the old Northern races who have since spread over the world, planting their ideas everywhere.  In the oldest Scandinavian literature you will find that women were thought of and treated by the men of the North very much as they are thought of and treated by Englishmen of to-day.  You will find what their power was in the old sagas, such as the Njal-Saga, or “The Story of Burnt Njal.”  But we must go much further than the written literature to get a full knowledge of the origin of such a sentiment.  The idea seems to have existed that woman was semi-divine, because she was the mother, the creator of man.  And we know that she was credited among the Norsemen with supernatural powers.  But upon this Northern foundation there was built up a highly complex fabric