ments, moral sentiments, and general characteristics of the women, say, of Great Britain?
It may appear somewhat remarkable that the best, if not the first complete account of the evolution and characteristics of the English woman should be written by a foreigner. This, however, is of a piece with the fact that for several years the professor of the Japanese language and literature in Tokio University was an Englishman—Professor Basil Chamberlain. But apart from the fact that we never understand ourselves, never study ourselves, never dare to criticize ourselves, until some outsider like Max O'Rell, Mark Twain, or Yoshio Markino looks at us through his spectacles, there is an additional significance in a foreigner writing on English women. I remember many years ago asking a German student of philosophy, who had come to Edinburgh University to study Sanskrit, how they got on with the philosophical writings of their great countryman, Kant. He said that when they failed to make out his meaning in the German original they consulted a French translation; the French, he said, were quick to seize the general meaning of a passage. Now Staars has undoubtedly studied the facts, has seized the meaning of the problems of the women in England, and has accomplished the difficult task of putting them in their proper perspective. He gives as complete an account as one can possibly give of the legal and social position of women in England and of the characteristics that have resulted in consequence of such position. He shows why the nineteenth century was a period of progress and expansion, and what movements characterized it; how a demand for education arose, and how one door after another was open to women in literature, science, and commerce; how expansion cannot be restrained
