of himself; and woman has not, which precludes us from answering back, as it were, which is always more or less of a consolation when one is brought to bay.

A tendency to compromise is certainly one of man's characteristics. Barbara has referred to it as a salient fault-a vice, and perhaps it is, though it is writ large in the annals of civilization as conducted by man. We must at least agree that it is not woman's way, and that she expects to do without it when we are no more or are less than we are now. Probably we have been and are too easy-going, and no one will deny that one ought at all times to have the courage of one's convictions, even in midsummer and on purely social occasions; nevertheless it would have been trying to the nervous system and conducive to the continuance and increase of standing armies had we favored the policy of shooting at sight those whose views on the temperance question differed from ours, or of telling the host at whose house we had passed the evening that we had been bored to death.

If one runs over in his mind the Madame Tussaud Gallery of masculine types, he cannot fail to acknowledge that, in our capacity of lords of creation and vicegerents of Providence, we have produced and perpetuated a number of sorry specimens. First in the list stands the so-called man of the world, on account of whom in particular, according to Barbara, the nineteenth-century Joan of Arc looks askance at our sex. He is an old stager; he dates back very nearly, if not completely, to the garden of

bibber, a glutton, a miser, an idler, or a mere pleasure-seeker. If all the human industries which have owed and still owe their prosperity to his propensities were to be obliterated, there would be a large array of unemployed in the morning but a healthier world. The bully, or prevailer by brute force, the snob, the cynic, the parasite, the trimmer, and the conceited egotist are others prominent in the category, without regard to criminals and unvarnished offenders against whose noxious behavior men have protected themselves by positive law. On the other hand, our gallery of past types has many figures of which we have a right to be proud. Unfortunately we are barred again from comparison or answering back by the taunt that woman has never had a chance; nevertheless we may claim for what it is worth that, in the realm of intellect or of the spirit, there have been no women who have soared so high; seers, poets, law-givers, unfolders of nature's secrets, administrators of af

fairs, healers and scholars have been chiefly or solely men. If some of us have fraternized with Belial, others have walked, or sought to walk, with God no less genuinely and fervently than any woman who ever breathed. In the matter of spirituality, indeed, some of us in the past having been led to believe that women knew more about the affairs of the other world than men, sought to cultivate the spindle-legged, thin-chested, pale, anamic Christian as the type of humanity most acceptable to God and serviceable to society; but we have gone back to the bishop of sturdy frame and a reasonably healthy appetite as a more desirable mediator between ourselves and heaven.

Eden, and he has always been a bugbear to woman. It is not necessary to describe him; he has ever stood for simply carnal interests and appetites, whether as a satyr, a voluptuary, a wine

From the stand-point of our present inquiry, what man in his various types has been in the past is less pertinent

than what he is at present. To begin with, certainly the modern man is not a picturesque figure. He no longer appeals to the feminine or any eye by virtue of imposing apparel or accoutrements. Foreign army officers and servants in livery are almost the only males

"Foreign army officers."

who have not exchanged plumage for sober woollens, tweeds, or serges, and the varied resplendent materials and colors by means of which men used to distinguish themselves from one another and to negative their evil-doings in the eyes of women have been discarded. All men but one look alike to any woman, and even that one is liable to be confounded with the rest of mankind when he is more than half a block away. Nor is the homogeneous tendency limited to clothes; it includes manners, morals, and point of view. The extreme types approximate each other much more closely than formerly, and apart from criminals and deliberately evil-minded persons, women have some ground for their insinuation that we are all pretty much alike. Let it be said that this effect is in one sense a feather in our caps. The nineteenth-century Joan of Arc to the contrary notwithstanding, the modern man of the world is a manifest improvement on his predecessor. He is no longer to be found under the table after dinner as a social

matter of course, and three-bottles-to-aguest festivities have ceased to be an aristocratic function. Though on occasions still he will fumble with the latch-key, he mounts the stairs very little, if at all, after midnight with the nonchalance of self-congratulatory sobriety, and all those dire

scenes of woman on the staircase with a lighted candle looking down at her pros trate lord and master belong to an almost dim past. True it may be that the man of the world fears God no more than formerly, but he has learned to have a wholesome dread of Bright's disease, the insane asylum, and those varied forms of sudden and premature death

which are included under the reportorial head of heart-failure. Mere brutishness in its various forms is less apparent. The coarse materialist still swaggers in public places and impudently puffs a cigar in the face of modesty, but he serves no longer as a model for envious contemporaries or an object of hero-worship to the rising generation. Good taste, if nothing better, has checked man's tendencies to make a beast of himself in public or in private.

Similarly, also, the type of man to whom we look up most proudly and confidently to-day is not altogether the same. The model whom we were urged, and whom we sought of old to imitate, was he who wrestled with God on the mountain-top, without a thought of earth's smoke and din and wretchedness. Human life and its joys and interests served for him as a homily on vanity, or was regarded as a degradation in comparison with the revelations obtained by the priest, poet, or devotee of culture through the vista of aspiring imagination or zeal. The conservative

"With one fell swoop of her broom."

man of affairs-vigorous, far seeing,

keenly alive to the joys and interests of this life, strongly sympathetic on the humanitarian side, a man of the world withal in a reasonable sense -has impressed his personality on modern society more successfully than any other type. The priest who cares not for his fellow-man, the poet whose dreams and visions include no human interest or passion, the devotee of culture who refines merely to refine, have been superseded, and in their stead we have the man of the world who is interested in the world and for the world.

This change in the avowed aims and aspirations of man has not been without certain apparently melancholy results and manifestations of which society is feeling the effect at present, and which if allowed to prevail too far will undo us. The removal of the gaze of the priest, poet, and devotee of culture from the stars in contempt of earth, and the substitution of earth gazing as a method for understanding the stars, has seemed to cast a damper on human imagination and has thereby caused many excellent women and some men to weep. If materialism be the science of trying to get the most out of this life, this is a material age; but at the same time it

should be remembered that man in this age has ceased for the first time to be either a hypocrite or a fool. Undoubtedly the process of becoming both sincere and sensible, especially as it has

substituted concern for the ignorant, the oppressed, and the vicious of this earth about whom we know next to nothing, in place of Pre-Raphaelite heavenly choirs, alabaster halls, and saints in glory about whom we thought we knew everything, has been a little trying for the rest of us as well as for the priests, poets, and devotees of culture. But the women must not be discouraged; we shall grow to the situation in time, and even the poets, who seem to be most down in the mouth at present, will sooner or later find a fresh well of inspiration by learning to study the reflection of the stars on the earth instead of looking directly at them. Let them be patient, though it be to death, and some day through others, if not through themselves, the immortal verse will flow and the immortal lyre sound again.

Undoubtedly the modern man is at present a rather trying person to woman, for woman would have been glad, now that she is coming into her kingdom, to have him more of a crusader and less of a philosopher. To behold him lacking in picturesqueness and a philosopher addicted to compromise

"Ordinarily he is sleepy in the evening."

into the bargain is almost irritating to her, and she has certainly some ground for criticism. The man who sits opposite to her at the breakfast-table, even after he has overcome conservative fears of nothing to live on and dawdled into matrimony, is a lovable but not especially exciting person. He eats, works, and sleeps, does most of the things which he ought to do and leaves undone a commendable number of the things which he ought not to do, and is a rather respectable member of society of the machine-made order. He works very hard to supply her with money; he is kind to her and the children; he gives her her head, as he calls it; and he acquiesces pleasantly enough in the social plans which she entertains for herself and him, and ordinarily he is sleepy in the evening. Indeed in moments of most serious depression she is tempted to think of him as a superior choreman, a comparison which haunts her even in church. She would like, with one fell swoop of her broom, to clear the world of the social evil, the fruit of the grape, tobacco, and playing cards, to introduce drastic educational reforms which would, by kindergarten methods, familiarize every one on earth with art and culture, and to bring to pass within five, or possibly six years, a golden age of absolute reform inspired and established by woman. Life for her at present means one vast camp of committee meetings, varied only by frequent cups of tea; and that steaming beverage continues prominent in her radiant vision of the coming millennium. No wonder it disconcerts and annoys her to find so comparatively little enthusiastic confidence in the immediate success of her fell swoop, and to have her pathway blocked by grave or lazy ifs and buts and by cold contradictions of fact. No wonder she abhors compromise; no wonder she regards the man who goes on using tobacco and playing cards and drinking things stronger than tea as an inert and soulless creature.

Yet smile as we may at the dull, sorry place the world would be were the golden age of her intention to come upon

us over night like a cold wave, is she not justified in regarding the average custom-made man of the day as a highly respectable, well-to-do choreman who earns fair wages and goes to sleep at night contented with a good meal and a pipe? Is he not machine-made? Sincere and wise as he is, now that his gaze is fixed on the needs of earth, has he not the philosophy of hygienic comfort and easy-going conservative materialism so completely on the brain that he is in danger of becoming ordinary instead of just a little lower than the angels? Let us consider him from this point of view more in detail.

II

THE young man of the present era on his twenty-first birthday is apt to find himself in a very prudent and conservative atmos

phere. The difficulties of getting on are explained to him; he is properly assured that, though there is

It

plenty of room on the top benches, the occupations and professions are crowded, if not overcrowded, and that he must buckle down if he would succeed. is obvious to him that the field of adventure and fortune-seeking in foreign or strange places is practically exhausted. It is open to him, to be sure, to go to the North Pole in search of some one already there, or to study in a cage in the jungles of Africa the linguistic value of the howls and chatterings of wild animals; but these are manifestly poor pickings compared with the opportunities of the past when a considerable por

tion of the globe was still uninvestigated soil, and a reputation or treasure-trove was the tolerably frequent reward of leaving the rut of civilized life. It is plainly pointed out to him, too, that to be florid is regarded as almost a mental weakness in intellectual or progressive circles. He sees the lawyer who makes use of metaphor, bombast, and the other arts of oratory, which used to captivate and convince, distanced in the race for eminence by him who employs a succinct, dispassionate, and almost colloquial form of statement. He recognizes that in every department of human activity, from the investigation of disease-germs to the management of railroads, steady, undemonstrative marshallings of fact, and cautious, unemotional deduction therefrom are considered the scientific and only appropriate method. He knows that the expression of unusual or erratic ideas will expose him to the stigma of being a crank, a reputation which, once acquired, sticks like pitch, and that the betrayal of sentiment will induce conservative people to put him on the suspected list.

All this is imbibed by him as it should be, in the interest of sincerity and sense. Under the sobering restraint of it the young man begins to make his way

appeals to his imagination or emotions, he puts his doubts or qualms aside next morning at the behest of business. He wishes to get on. He is determined not to allow anything to interfere with that, and he understands that that is to be accomplished partly by hard work and partly

by becoming a good fellow and showing common-sense. This is excellent reasoning until one examines too closely what is expected of him as a good fellow, and what is required of him in the name of common-sense.

There have been good fellows in every age, and some of them have been tough specimens. Our good fellow is almost highly respectable. He wishes to live as long as he can, and to let others live as long as they can. His patron saints are his doctor, his bank account, prudence, and general toleration. If he were obliged to specify the vice not covered by the statute law which he most abhors, he would probably name slopping over. He aims to be genial, sympathetic, and knowing, but not obtrusively so, and he is becomingly suspicious and reticent regarding everything which cannot be demonstrated on a chart like an international yacht-race or a medical operation. He is quietly and moderately licentious, and justifies himself satisfactorily but mournfully on hygi enic grounds or on the plea of masculine inevitability. He works hard, if he has to, for he wishes to live comfortably by the time he is forty, and comfort means, as it ought to mean, an attractive wife, an attractive establishment, and an at