It must be confessed that man has had a long inning.  Perhaps it is true that he owed this to his physical strength, and that he will only keep it hereafter by intellectual superiority, by the dominance of mind.  And how in this generation is he equipping himself for the future?  He is the money-making animal.  That is beyond dispute.  Never before were there such business men as this generation can show—­Napoleons of finance, Alexanders of adventure, Shakespeares of speculation, Porsons of accumulation.  He is great in his field, but is he leaving the intellectual province to woman?  Does he read as much as she does?  Is he becoming anything but a newspaper-made person?  Is his mind getting to be like the newspaper?  Speaking generally of the mass of business men—­and the mass are business men in this country—­have they any habit of reading books?  They have clubs, to be sure, but of what sort?  With the exception of a conversation club here and there, and a literary club, more or less perfunctory, are they not mostly social clubs for comfort and idle lounging, many of them known, as other workmen are, by their “chips”?  What sort of a book would a member make out of “Chips from my Workshop”?  Do the young men, to any extent, join in Browning clubs and Shakespeare clubs and Dante clubs?  Do they meet for the study of history, of authors, of literary periods, for reading, and discussing what they read?  Do they in concert dig in the encyclopaedias, and write papers about the correlation of forces, and about Savonarola, and about the Three Kings?  In fact, what sort of a hand would the Three Kings suggest to them?  In the large cities the women’s clubs, pursuing literature, art, languages, botany, history, geography, geology, mythology, are innumerable.  And there is hardly a village in the land that has not from one to six clubs of young girls who meet once a week for some intellectual purpose.  What are the young men of the villages and the cities doing meantime?  How are they preparing to meet socially these young ladies who are cultivating their minds?  Are they adapting themselves to the new conditions?  Or are they counting, as they always have done, on the adaptability of women, on the facility with which the members of the bright sex can interest themselves in base-ball and the speed of horses and the chances of the “street”?  Is it comfortable for the young man, when the talk is about the last notable book, or the philosophy of the popular poet or novelist, to feel that laughing eyes are sounding his ignorance?

Man is a noble creation, and he has fine and sturdy qualities which command the admiration of the other sex, but how will it be when that sex, by reason of superior acquirements, is able to look down on him intellectually?  It used to be said that women are what men wish to have them, that they endeavored to be the kind of women who would win masculine admiration.  How will it be if women have determined to make themselves