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cealments would undeniably be greater. The plain reason for this difference is, that women have more points to gain in society, while men have more to gain in business. Men deceive to gain money, women to gain favor. The instinct of self-preservation is at the bottom of both orders of falsehood. Women, who must have occupation and position, seek them in the direction which offers least resistance. It is always easier to rest in the satisfaction of the emotional life than to push forward in the direction of intellectual growth. The hard work and hard thinking which the world exacts before it will give place and remunerative occupation to the worker is too hard a condition for most women with their present development. It is easier to take up and deal with simpler things; and, if this simpler work gives occupation and subsistence, the end is gained.

The strong and constant demands which wifehood and motherhood make upon the physical, the emotional, and the moral forces, seem to constitute a reason for the checking of intellectual growth. Yet, in the cases of women upon whom no such demands are made, we see no higher degree of development; and this certainly helps to show that their general contentment, with emotional gratification, is an inherent trait. What sufficient cause can there be for this relatively lower development than the relatively smaller bodies and brains of those who exhibit the effect?

There is a direct ethical value in the exercise of the intellect. Its most healthful action can occur only where the moral nature is perfectly sound. We can not acquire facts or reason to conclusions under emotional excitement, or when we are devising some social stratagem. If there is any reason for concealment of motives or of conduct, the necessity for keeping up that concealment will so employ the brain as to render any except this low form of action impossible. The attainment of moral purity, in the sense of a strong desire for the right and true, is the clearing of the field and preparation of the soil for intellectual harvests. The motive to selfpreservation and the very general dependence of women upon men for the means of life have fostered moral disease. We know a woman who, for the last quarter of a century, has habitually taken money from her husband's purse while he was asleep, and this has been done to supply reasonable needs and social requirements which he ignored. To be free from the temptation to deceive men, women must be independent of them in respect to the means of life, and they must gain such an intellectual culture as shall lift them out of

their exclusive indulgence of the emotions. At present, women seem obliged to marry for two reasons: one, that they can not win social independence without it; and the other, that their emotional natures crave constant exercise. How much the severe culture of the intellect will do toward the moral redemption of women by making them less dependent upon men, and less solicitous for their favor, is one of the problems of our future civilization.

One perplexing aspect of the sex question has grown into conconsiderable importance in America, the so-called free-love philosophy. The very great majority of women, with their inability to take in facts in their larger relations, have nothing but utter condemnation for a movement which attempts the destruction of the family in the name of a reform. The majority of advocates of this social theory are men who show that they have thought upon the question, but that their conclusions have neglected some of the most influential facts. One of the fundamental arguments against the present solution of sex relations is that monogamic marriage is a failure: it has not solved the problem of human happiness. Instead of this rotten social institution, in which men and women give pledges and promises under legal and ecclesiastical sanction, it is proposed to substitute absolute personal control of these relations. Neither church nor state, it is claimed, has any more moral right to interfere with individual freedom to form and to dissolve sexual ties than to interfere with the choice, purchase, or sale of a house or of a suit of clothes. The history of civil liberty, it is said, is a history of the enlargement of the rights of the individual; as he has grown more intelligent, he has continually wrested from the state more and more liberty to control his own actions. It is the policy of governing organizations, like church and state, to keep men in vassalage as long as possible. People can not be freed from irksome matrimonial bondage without the expense and delay of legal processes. So long as people must submit judgment and inclination to statute laws, on such questions they are children or slaves instead of freemen. Such is the general argument of these reformers.

It is not hard to discover the sources of such a social theory. The plan of government in the United States favors the largest possible individualism. It was to give the freest possible play to individual rights that the men of the Revolution fought their battles and framed their laws. The easy conditions of divorce and the yearly augmenting number of divorces under state legislation is a further movement toward strengthening individualism. If

anything goes wrong, the spirit of our legislation is to right it, as far as practicable, by altering the conditions for the individual. This extreme liberality of the state toward her citizens is analogous to the indulgence of a mother to her children who insist on trying some experiment which the mother foresees will not help them. Yet the wise mother knows that the scientific method of developing her child is to let it see for itself what is helpful and hurtful. Changed conditions sometimes increase the happiness of sexual relations; but, as the reason for unhappy associations is found in the imperfect moral development or lack of judgment of those forming them, the way to insure happier results is to improve human nature. Happy unions are always voluntary, not only at the beginning, but as long as life lasts. Love can not be made free by a change of statutes. It can not be bound or loosed under any circumstances. If the state should listen to the petitions of those who ask that sex relations be exempted from control, the experience of a quarter of a century would convince the world that the old, long-tried, monogamic solution of the sex question is the wise one. There are evident reasons why such a result would come. In all the past emotional experience of the race it has been found impossible to create an intense idealization of more than one object at one time; it has been found, too, that when such idealization has been tested by knowledge and time it does not diminish, but deepen; and that the effect of this long-continued idealization is to create the best conditions of development, both for those who exercise it and for those toward whom it is directed. Now, if the best conditions of happiness are once secured they should be maintained. It is not possible to bring out all the results of this mutual sex idealization in any short period of association. The very fact that the association is a permanent one gives it earnestness and dignity. It would not be possible to extract from a half-dozen associations, extending over twenty-five years, the same amount of fine character-development that would come from one fortunate association lasting for the same time. When we are once sure of the wisdom, integrity, and affection of some friend through long experience, we spend no more brain-activity in learning his peculiarities of character and in adapting ourselves to them. The association of husband and wife is rather moral and affectional than intellectual. It is a rest, a certainty, a point of departure for all other activities. Once settled, and safely settled, we waste no power in readjusting these relations, but take the fruit as it ripens,

without the need of uprooting the old and planting new trees. There is abundance of unanswerable scientific proof of better results in character and in happiness from long-continued sexual association than from transient and varied connections. For the state to grant to individuals the power of forming and dissolving such associations at will would be to grant them a power of injuring themselves by an unwholesome experiment. If the facts be carefully studied they will convince any fair-minded observer of the true solution of this question, without a resort to such a dangerous legislation. A wiser development of human nature in all directions is the real key to human happiness.

M. A. HARDAKER.

THE PANAMA CANAL.

LAST year, when I addressed to the "North American Review" my first article on the project of an interoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Panama, basing my arguments upon the decision of an International Congress of engineers, navigators, and men of science, public opinion in the United States and even in Europe still entertained some doubts touching four highly important points. These

were:

1. The supposed insalubrity of the climate of Panama.

2. The possibility of constructing the works needed in order to establish maritime communication at constant sea-level between the two oceans, without either locks or tunnels; in short, the possibility of carrying out the scheme approved by the Congress of 1879.

3. A reliable estimate of the cost, which could only be determined on the spot by soundings and by taking longitudinal and transverse profiles; though the Congress, in the absence of the complete data, which were reserved till the execution of the work, had notoriously presented highly exaggerated figures.

4. The supposed opposition of the United States.

It was in order to meet these doubts that I visited America in company with an international committee of engineers, whose duty it was to make a definitive study of the ground with a view to the execution of the work.

These engineers, whose very names are a guarantee of their competence, were :

Mr. Dircks, Engineer-in-chief of the Waterstaat of the Netherlands, who so successfully directed the great work of constructing the canal from Amsterdam to the sea.

The American engineer, Colonel Totten, who constructed the railway from Aspinwall to Panama.

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