virtue in connection with the life of such places. In short, she was no citizen. Her motherhood was purely instinctive and domestic—that is to say, rudimentary. So, home-maker as she was, she quickly made of the city a desolation. The chapter of history which tells how this came to pass is full of interest and meaning for the modern politician, for the modern psychologist, and above all for the modern woman. It seems to indicate that not man only, but also woman must develop civic virtues, if the home is to be built on safe foundations.
In north-western Europe the woman question was settled and unsettled in rather a different way. Here was no sacred atrium, no gynacée hidden in the heart of a dwelling built amid surroundings of sunny, radiant peace. Only the tumult of waves, the rustling of heavy foliage, the wild voices of the storm and the forest. The fighting warrior-husband and son could not and did not frame new codes of duty for the woman, nor did they discover peculiar faults, vices, and imbecilities in her. Such sickly tasks were not for these wild men—nor did their women, from what we learn of them, lend themselves to those subtle, but unwholesome arts that suggest to men the idea that their nature is a mere puzzle in perverse words and dangerous impulses. No! Life was too simple—and also we may add too noble in its rude way for all this in the wild forests of the barbarous Northmen. The barbarian saw that the woman was not his equal in physical strength, and that she could not bear arms. She was physically the weaker, but there, for him, her
