the intuitive or womanly quality of mind.  And nothing can be finer or truer than the words in which Buckle predicts the benefits that are to come from the intellectual union of the sexes for the work of the future.  “In that field which we and our posterity have yet to traverse, I firmly believe that the imagination will effect quite as much as the understanding.  Our poetry will have to reinforce our logic, and we must feel quite as much as we must argue.  Let us, then, hope that the imaginative and emotional minds of one sex will continue to accelerate the great progress by acting upon and improving the colder and harder minds of the other sex.  By this coalition, by this union of different faculties, different tastes, and different methods, we shall go on our way with the greater ease.”

[Footnote 1:  Pp. 22, 23, Am. ed.]

[Footnote 2:  Vol. ii. p. 311, Am. ed]

THE SPIRIT OF SMALL TYRANNY

When Mr. John Smauker and the Bath footmen invited Sam Weller to their “swarry,” consisting of a boiled leg of mutton, each guest had some expression of contempt and wrath for the humble little green-grocer who served them,—­“in the true spirit,” Dickens says, “of the very smallest tyranny.”  The very fact that they were subject to being ordered about in their own persons gave them a peculiar delight in issuing tyrannical orders to others:  just as sophomores in college torment freshmen because other sophomores once teased the present tormentors themselves; and Irishmen denounce the Chinese for underbidding them in the labor market, precisely as they were themselves denounced by native-born Americans thirty years ago.  So it has sometimes seemed to me that the men whose own positions and claims are really least commanding are those who hold most resolutely that women should be kept in their proper place of subordination.

A friend of mine maintains the theory that men large and strong in person are constitutionally inclined to do justice to women, as fearing no competition from them in the way of bodily strength; but that small and weak men are apt to be vehemently opposed to anything like equality in the sexes.  He quotes in defence of his theory the big soldier in London who justified himself for allowing his little wife to chastise him, on the ground that it pleased her and did not hurt him; and on the other hand cites the extreme domestic tyranny of the dwarf Quilp.  He declares that in any difficult excursion among woods and mountains, the guides and the able-bodied men are often willing to have women join the party, while it is sure to be opposed by those who doubt their own strength or are reluctant to display their weakness.  It is not necessary to go so far as my friend goes; but many will remember some fact of this kind, making such theories appear not quite so absurd as at first.