His twenty "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One," published three years before the caricature, inculcated the same lesson. A great empire, he remarked, was in one particular like a great cake: it could be most easily diminished at the edges. The person, therefore, who had undertaken the task of reducing it should take care to begin at the remotest provinces, and not till after they were lopped off cut up the central portion. His twenty "Rules" are merely a humorous history of the British colonial policy since the accession of George III.: Don't incorporate your colonies with the mother country, quarter troops among them, appoint for their governors broken gamblers and exhausted roués, despise their voluntary grants, and harass them with novel taxes. By such measures as these "you will act like a wise gingerbread baker, who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through at the places where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces." Franklin also wrote a shorter burlesque, pompously headed, "An Edict of the King of Prussia," in which that monarch was supposed to claim sovereign rights over Great Britain on the ground that the island had been colonized by Hengist, Horsa, and others, subjects of "our renowned ducal ancestors." The edict, of course, ordains and commands precisely those absurd things which the Government of Great Britain had ordained and commanded since the planting of the colonies. Iron, as the edict duly sets forth, had been discovered in the island of Great Britain by "our colonists there," who, "presuming that they had a natural right to make the best use they could of the natural productions of their country," had erected furnaces and forges for the manufacture of the same, to the detriment of the manufacturers of Prussia. This must be instantly stopped, and all the iron sent to Prussia to be manufactured. "And whereas the art and mystery of making hats has arrived at great perfection in Prussia," and "the islanders before mentioned, being in possession of wool, beaver, and other furs, have presumptuously conceived they had a right to take some advantage thereof by manufacturing the same into hats, to the prejudice of our domestic manufacture," therefore we do hereby forbid them to do so any more.

We call this piece a burlesque, but it was burlesque only in form. Precisely such restrictions existed upon the industry of the American colonists. It was part of the protective system of the age, and not much more unjust than the parts of the same system to which the descendants of those colonists have since subjected themselves.

An ignorant man at the head of a government, however honest he may be, is liable to make fatal mistakes in the selection of his ministers. He naturally dreads the close inspection of minds superior to his own. He has always to be on his good behavior before them, which is irksome. He shares the stock prejudices of mankind, one of which is a distrust of practiced politicians. But as the poorest company of actors will get through a comedy with less discredit than the best amateurs, so an administration of "party hacks" will usually carry on a government with less odious failure than an administration composed of better men without experience in public business. George III. had, moreover, a singularly unfortunate trait for a king who had to govern by party leaders—his prejudices against individuals were inveterate. Lord Waldegrave remarked "a kind of unhappiness in his temper" while he was still a youth. "Whenever he is displeased, his anger does not break out with heat and violence, but he becomes sullen and silent, and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study and contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill-humor." And when he re-appeared, it was but too evident that he had not forgotten the offense. He never forgot, he seldom forgave. "The same strength of memory," as Earl Russell once wrote of him, "and the same brooding sullenness against those who opposed his will, which had been observed in the boy, were manifest in the man."

This peculiarity of character always prevented the formation of a proper ministry, and shortened the duration of every ministry which was approximately proper. During the first ten years of his reign his dislike of William Pitt, the natural chief of the Whig party, confused every arrangement; and during the next twenty years the most cherished object of his policy seemed to be to keep from power the natural successor of that minister—Charles James Fox. The ascendency of both those leaders was such that to exclude them from power was to paralyze their own party, and prevent the free play of politics in the House of Commons. It reduced the poor king at last to pit against Napoleon Bonaparte a young rhetorician of defective health, William Pitt, the son of the great minister.

CHAPTER XIV.
DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

In France, more conspicuously than in England, kingship broke down in that century. Louis XV., born in a private station, might have risen to the ownership of a small livery-stable, in which position his neighbors, commenting upon his character in the candid manner of French neighbors, would have epitomized him as a cross, proud pig. Those dull kings who finished kingship in Europe possessed but one trait which we usually associate with the kingly character—pride—and this was the single point of resemblance between Louis XV. and George III. Once in his life, it is related, Louis XV. uttered a few words with a vivacity approaching eloquence. "Would you believe," said he to Madame de Pompadour, "that there is a man in my court who dares to lift his eyes to one of my daughters?" He was blazing with passion at the thought of such flagrant impiety.

And was there ever, since sacred childhood first appealed for protection to the human heart, a child so unhappily placed as that baby king, an orphan, with a roué for a guardian, a smooth, insinuating priest for preceptor, and a dissolute court conspiring to corrupt him? The priest, who represented what then passed for virtue, taught him virtue out of a dreary catechism, still extant, which never yet elevated or nobly formed a human soul—a dead, false thing, with scarcely an atom in it of sound nutrition for heart or mind. But Cardinal Fleury had some success with his pupil. Thirty years after, when Pompadour was supplying him with fresh young girls of fourteen and fifteen, bought from their mothers by her for this purpose, the king's conscience would not permit him to go to bed until he had knelt down by the side of the timid victim, and required her to join him in saying the prescribed prayers.

The courtiers were not less successful in their endeavors. At the tender age of six years they provided for him an entertainment which gave the old Marquis de Dangeau the idea that they had formed the purpose of "drying up in him the very source of good feeling." They caused thousands of sparrows to be let loose in a vast hall, where they gave the boy the "divertissement" of seeing them shoot the birds, and covering all the floor with bloody, fluttering, crying victims. He doubtless enjoyed the spectacle, for at sixteen he shot in cold blood a pointer bred by himself, and accustomed to feed from his hand. So rude was he at seventeen, the chroniclers tell us, that the courtiers used all their arts to give him du goût pour les femmes, hoping thereby to render him "more polite and tractable." The precise manner in which a bevy of illustrious princesses and duchesses sought to débaucher le roi during one of the royal hunts is detailed in the diaries and satirized in the epigrams of the time.

The ladies, long frustrated by the "ferocity" of the youth, who cared only for hunting, succeeded at last, and succeeded with the applause of all the court. "Every one else has a mistress," remarks Barbier, advocate and magistrate; "why shouldn't the king?" It was a long reign of mistresses. Changes of ministry, questions of peace or war, promotions and appointments of generals and admirals, the arrest of authors and nobles—all were traceable to the will or caprice of a mistress. Frederick of Prussia styled Pompadour, Petticoat the Third, which some one was kind enough to report to her; and when Voltaire, whom she "protected," conveyed to the Prussian monarch a complimentary message, he replied, coldly, "I don't know her." Maria Theresa of Austria, a proud and high-principled lady, stooped to recognize her existence, and wrote her civil notes. If there is any truth in the printed gossip of the innermost court circles of that period, it was this difference in the treatment of the king's mistress which made France the ally of Austria in the Seven Years' War.

Would the reader like to know how affairs go on in a court governed by a mistress, then let him ponder this one sample anecdote, related by the femme de chambre of Madame de Pompadour, showing how she, femme de chambre as she was, obtained a lieutenant's commission in the army for one of her relations. She first asked "madame" for the commission; but as madame was in full intrigue to remove the Minister of War, this application did not succeed. "Pressed by my family," the femme de chambre relates, "who could not conceive that, in the position in which I was, it could be difficult for me to procure a trifling commission for a good soldier, I asked it directly from the minister himself. He received me coldly, and gave me little hope. On going out, the Marquis de V—— followed me, and said: 'You desire a commission. There is one vacant, which has been promised to a protégé of mine; but if you are willing to exchange favors with me, I will yield it to you. What I desire is to play the part of Exempt de Police in "Tartuffe" the next time madame gives it in the palace before the king. It is a rôle of a few lines only. Get madame to assign that part to me, and the lieutenancy is yours.' I told madame of this. The thing was done. I obtained my lieutenancy, and the marquis thanked madame for the rôle as warmly as if she had made him a duke."

Generals were appointed to the command of expeditions for no better reason than this. That Pompadour drew thirty-six millions of francs from the "royal treasury," i. e., from the earnings of the frugal and laborious French people, could easily have been borne. It was government by mistresses and for mistresses, the government of ignorant and idle caprice, that broke down monarchy in France and set the world on fire. Of the evils which corrupt rulers bring upon communities, the waste of the people's money (though that is a great evil in so poor a world as ours, with such crowds of poor relations and so much to be done) is among the least. It is the absence of intelligence and public spirit in the Government that brings on ruin.

"As long as I live," said Louis XV. one day to Madame de Pompadour, "I shall be the master, to do as I like. But my grandson will have trouble." Madame was of the same mind, but gave it neater expression: "After us the deluge."

The world is familiar with the tragic incidents of the sudden collapse of the monarchy. Except during the Reign of Terror, which was short, the caricaturists, whether with the pen or the pencil, played their usual part. It was almost impossible to caricature the abuses of the times, so monstrous was the reality. The "local hits" in Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro," played with rapturous applause a hundred nights in 1784, were little more than the truth given with epigrammatic brevity. When the saucy page, Cherubin, confessed that he had behaved very badly, but rested his defense upon the fact that he had never been guilty of the slightest indiscretion in words, and so obtained both pardon and promotion, the audience must have felt the perfect congruity of the incident with the moral code of the period. In Figaro's famous discourse on the English God-dam there is, indeed, a touch of caricature: "A fine language the English; a little of it goes a great way. The English people, it is true, throw in some other words in the course of conversation, but it is very easy to see that God-dam is the basis of their language." When he descants upon politics, he rarely goes beyond the truth: "Ability advance a man in the Government bureaus! My lord is laughing at me. Be commonplace and obsequious, and you get every thing." Figaro gives the whole art of French politics in a few words: "To pretend you don't know what you do know, and to know what you don't; to hear what you understand, and not to hear what you don't understand; and especially to pretend you can do a great deal more than you can; often to have for a very great secret that there is no secret; to shut yourself up to mend pens and seem profound, when you are only empty and hollow; to play well or ill the part of a personage; to spread abroad spies and pensioned traitors; to melt seals, intercept letters, and try to ennoble the poverty of the means by the importance of the ends—may I die if that isn't all there is of politics." It is a good hit of Susan's when she says that vapors are "a disease of quality," only to be taken in boudoirs. A poor woman whose cause is coming on at court remarks that selling judgeships is a great abuse. "You are right," says the dolt of a magistrate; "we ought to get them for nothing." And how a Paris audience, in the temper of 1789, must have relished the hits at the hereditary principle: "It is no matter whence you came; the important question is, whither are you bound?" "What have you done, my lord, to merit so many advantages—rank, fortune, place? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more." We can fancy, too, how such touches as this might bring down the house: "I was thought of for an office, but unfortunately I was fit for it. An arithmetician was wanted; a dancer got it."

All men, as Mr. Carlyle observes, laughed at these jests, and none louder than the persons satirized—"a gay horse-racing Anglo-maniac noblesse loudest of all."

The first picture given in these pages relating to the French Revolution, "The Assembly of the Notables," is one of the most celebrated caricatures ever produced, and one of the best. Setting aside one or two of Thackeray's, two or three of Gillray's, and half a dozen of Mr. Nast's, it would be difficult to find its equal. It may be said, however, that the force of the satire is wholly in the words, which, indeed, have since become one of the stock jokes of French Joe Millers. The picture appeared in 1787, when the deficit in the revenue, after having widened for many years, had become most alarming, and it was at length proposed to tax the nobility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto exempt from vulgar taxation. But the Assembly of the Notables, which was chiefly composed of the exempt, preferred to prolong inquiry into the causes of the deficit, and showed an unconquerable reluctance to impose a tax upon themselves. It was during this delay, so fatal to the monarchy, that the caricature appeared. There must have been more than one version of the work, for the one described by Mr. Carlyle in his "History of the French Revolution" differs in several particulars from that which we take from M. Champfleury. Mr. Carlyle says: "A rustic is represented convoking the poultry of his barn-yard with this opening address, 'Dear animals, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with,' to which a cock responding, 'We don't want to be eaten,' is checked by, 'You wander from the point!'"

The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 menaced Europe with one of the greatest of all evils—the premature adoption of liberal institutions. Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to found a government by the whole people where the mass of the working population are grossly ignorant and superstitious. The reason is known to all who have had an opportunity of closely observing the workings of such minds. They can only be swayed by arts which honest intelligence can not use, and therefore they will be usually governed by men who have an interest in misleading them. Great Britain was nearer a republic than any other nation in Europe; but England, too, needed another century to get the tap-room reduced, the people's school developed in every parish, and the educated class intensely alive to the "folly of heaping importance upon idiots."

Edmund Burke was the man who, more than any other, held England back from revolution in 1792. Rational appeals to the rational faculty could not have availed. Appalled at what he saw in France, Burke, after thirty years' advocacy of liberal principles, and assisting to create a republic in America, became a fanatic of conservatism, and terrified England into standing by the monarchy. He was alarmed even at the influx of Frenchmen into England, flying from La Lanterne, and he gave vehement support to the Alien Act, which authorized the summary expulsion from the kingdom of foreigners suspected by the Government. Vehement? Some of his sentences read like lunacy. It was in the course of this debate that the celebrated dagger scene occurred which Gillray has satirized in the picture on the following page. A wild tale reached his ears of the manufacture of daggers at Birmingham for the use of French Jacobins in England, and one of them was given him as a specimen. It was an implement of such undecided form that it might have served as a dagger, a pike-head, or a carving-knife. He dashed it upon the floor of the House of Commons, almost hitting the foot of an honorable member, and proceeded to declaim against the unhappy exiles in the highest style of absurdity. "When they smile," said he, "I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is blood." A pause ensued after the orator had spoken a while in this strain. "You have thrown down a knife," said Sheridan; "where is the fork?" A shout of laughter followed this sally, which relieved the suppressed feelings of the House, but spoiled the "effect" of Mr. Burke's performance.

In the French caricatures that have come to us from the period of the Revolution (many hundreds in number) every phase of the struggle is exhibited with French finesse. There is even an elegance in some of their Revolutionary caricatures. How exquisite, for example, the picture which presents the first protest of the Third Estate, its first attempt to be Something in the nation which it maintained! We see a lofty and beautiful chariot or car of triumph, in which king, nobleman, and clergy gracefully ride, drawn by a pair of doves. The Third Estate is merely the beaten road on which the whole structure moves. Nothing could more elegantly satirize the sentimental stage of the Revolution, when the accumulated abuses of centuries were all to disappear amidst a universal effusion of brotherly love, while king, lords, and clergy rode airily along as before, borne up by a mute, submissive nation! When at last the Third Estate had become "Something" in the nation, a large number of sentimental pictures signalized the event. In one we see priest, noble, and peasant clasped in a fervent embrace, the noble trampling under foot a sheet of paper upon which is printed "Grandeurs," the priest treading upon "Benefices," the peasant upon "Hate." All wear the tricolor cockade, and underneath is written, "The wish accomplished. This is as I ever desired it should be." In another picture priest, noble, and peasant are playing together upon instruments—the priest upon a serpent-shaped trumpet, the noble upon a pipe, and the peasant upon the violin—the peasant in the middle, leading the performance, and exchanging looks of complacent affection with the others.

But even in the moment of triumph the effusion was not universal. There are always disagreeable people who doubt the duration of a millennium as soon as it has begun. Caricatures represented the three orders dancing together. "Will it last? won't it last?" sings a by-stander, using the refrain of an old song. "It is I who must pay the fiddler," cries the noble to the priest. From being fraternal, the Third Estate became patronizing. The three orders sit together in a café, and the peasant says, familiarly, "All right; every man pays his own shot." A picture entitled "Old Times and the New Time" bore the inscription, "Formerly the most useful class carried the load, and was trodden under foot. To-day all share the burden alike." From patronizing and condescending, the Third Estate, as all the world knows, speedily became aggressive and arbitrary. "Down with taxes!" appeared on some of the caricatures of 1789, when the public treasury was running dry. An extremely popular picture, often repeated, exhibits a peasant wearing the costume of all the orders, with the well-known inscription, so false and so fatal, "A single One makes the Three." An ignorant family is depicted listening with gaping eagerness to one who reveals to them that they too are the order of which they have been hearing such fine things. "We belong to the Third Estate!" they exclaim, with the triumphant glee of M. Jourdain when he heard that he had been speaking "prose" all his life without knowing it.

But peace and plenty did not come to the poor man's cottage, and the caricaturists began to mock his dream of a better day. We see in one of the pictures of 1790 a father of a family in chains, with his eyes fixed in ecstasy upon a beam of light, labeled "Hope." In another, poor Louis XVI. is styled "The Restorer of Liberty," but underneath we read the sad question, "Eh bien, but when will that put the chicken in the pot?" A devil entering a hovel is set upon by a peasant, who pummels him with a stick, while an old man cries out, "Hit him hard, hard, my son; he is an aristocrat;" and under the whole is written, "Is the devil, then, to be always at our door?" Again, we have the three orders forging the constitution with great ardor, the blacksmith holding the book on the anvil, while the priest and noble swing the sledge-hammer. Under the picture is the French smith's refrain, "Tot-tot-tot, Battez chaud, Tot-tot-tot." From an abyss a working-man draws a bundle of papers bearing the words, "The New Constitution, the Desire of the Nation," saying, as he does so, "Ah, I shall be well content when I have all those papers!"

The popular pictures grew ill-tempered as the hopes of the people declined, and the word aristocrat became synonymous with all that is most hostile to the happiness of man. A devil attired as a priest, teaching a school of little aristocrats, extols the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Citizens and soldiers are in full cry after a many-headed monster labeled "Aristocracy." An ass presides over a court of justice, and the picture is inscribed, "The Ass on the Bench; or, the End of Old Times." The clergy came in for their ample share of ridicule and vituperation. "What do we want with monks?" exclaimed an orator from the tribune of the Assembly in 1790. "If you tell me," he continued, "that it is just to allow pious men the liberty to lead a sedentary, solitary, or contemplative life, my answer is, that every man can be sedentary, solitary, or contemplative in his own room." Another speaker said, "If England to-day is flourishing, she owes it in part to the abolition of the religious orders." The caricaturists did not delay to aim their shafts at this new game. We see nuns trying on fashionable head-dresses, and friars blundering through a military exercise. The spectacle was exhibited to Europe of a people raging with contemptuous hate of every thing which had from time immemorial been held in honor.

As time wore on, after every other order in the State had been in turn the object of special animosity, the royal family, the envied victims of the old state of things, became the unpitied victims of the new. Until their ill-starred attempt to escape from France in June, 1792, there remained some little respect for the king, and some tenderness for his children. The picture given elsewhere of the crucifixion of the king was published by his adherents some months before the crisis as figurative of his sufferings, not as prophetic of his fate. But there was neither respect nor pity for the unhappy man after his blundering attempt to leave the country. An explosion of caricature followed. Before that event satirical pictures had been exposed only in the print-sellers' windows, but now, as M. Bayer records, "caricatures were sold wherever any thing was sold." The Jacobin Club, he adds, as often as they had a point to carry, caused caricatures to be made, which the shop-keepers found it to their interest to keep for sale.

Never was a woman so hated as she was by infuriate Paris in 1792. Never was womanhood so outraged as in some of the caricatures of that period. Nothing relating to her had any kind of sacredness. Her ancestors, her country, her mother, her children, her love for her children, her attachment to her husband, were all exhibited in the most odious light as so many additional crimes against liberty. Need it be said that her person was not spared? The single talent in which the French excel all the rest of the human family is that of subtly insinuating indecency by pen and pencil. But they did not employ this talent in the treatment of Marie Antoinette when she was about to redeem a frivolous life by a dignified death. With hideous indecency they presented her to the scorn of the public, as African savages might exhibit the favorite wife of a hostile chief when they had brought her to their stinking village a captive, bound, naked, and defiled.

And so passed away forever from the minds of men the sense of the divinity that once had hedged in a king. But so congenial to minds immature or unformed is the idea of hereditary chieftainship that to this day in Europe the semblance of a king seems the easiest resource against anarchy. Yet kings were put upon their good behavior, to hold their places until majorities learn to control their propensities and use their minds.

CHAPTER XV.
CARICATURES OF WOMEN AND MATRIMONY.

The reader, perhaps, after witnessing some of the French plays and comic operas with which we have been favored in recent years—such as "Frou-Frou," "The Sphinx," "Alixe," and others—may have turned in wild amazement to some friend familiar with Paris from long residence, and asked, Is there any truth in this picture? Are there any people in France who behave and live as these people on the stage behave and live? Many there can not be; for no community could exist half a generation if the majority lived so. But are there any? The correct answer to this question was probably given the other evening by a person accustomed to Paris life: "Yes, there are some; they are the people who write such stuff as this. As for the bal masqué, and things of that kind, it is a mere business, the simple object of which is to beguile and despoil the verdant of every land who go to Paris in quest of pleasure." French plays and novels we know do most ludicrously misrepresent the people of other countries. What, for example, can be less like truth than that solemn donkey of a Scotch duke in M. Octave Feuillet's play of "The Sphinx?" The dukes of Scotland are not so numerous nor so unconspicuous a body of men that they can not be known to a curious inquirer, and it is safe to assert that, whatever their faults may be, there is not among them a creature so unspeakably absurd as the viveur infernal of this play. If the author is so far astray with his Scotch duke, he is perhaps not so very much nearer the truth with his French marquis, a personage equally foreign to his experience.

We had in New York some years ago a dozen or two of young fellows, more or less connected with the press, most of them of foreign origin, who cherished the delusion that eating a bad supper in a cellar late at night, and uttering or singing semi-drunken nonsense, was an exceedingly noble, high-spirited, and literary way of consuming a weakly constitution and a small salary. They thought they were doing something in the manner of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. Any one who should have judged New York in the year 1855 by the writings of these young gentlemen would have supposed that we were wholly given up to silly, vulgar, and reckless dissipation. But, in truth, the "Bohemians," as they were proud to be styled, were both few and insignificant; their morning scribblings expressed nothing but the looseness of their own lives, and that was half pretense.

Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of la femme; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but la femme. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to la femme as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24]

The authors enlarge upon this congenial theme, describing their hero as going forth upon le pavé de Paris in quest of la femme as a keen hunter takes to the forest for the plump partridge or the bounding deer. Some he brought down with the resistless magnetism of his eye. "It was for him a veritable rapture, as well as the exertion of a power which he loved to try, to magnetize with his eye and make his own the first woman whom he chanced to meet in the throng." The substance of the chapter is that Gavarni, casting aside all the restraints of civilization and decency, lived in Paris the life of a low and dirty animal; and when, in consequence of so living, he found himself in Clichy for debt, he replenished his purse by delineating, as the fourberies de femmes, the tricks of the dissolute women who had got his money. That, at least, is the blunt American of our authors' dainty and elegant French.

In the records of the past, we find men speaking lightly of women whose laws and usages concede least to women.

The oldest thing accessible to us in these modern cities is the Saturday-morning service in an unreformed Jewish synagogue, some of the observances of which date back beyond the historic period. But there is nothing in it older than the sentiment expressed by the men when they thank God for his goodness in not making them women. Only men are admitted to the synagogue as equal worshipers, the women being consigned to the gallery, spectators of their husbands' devotion. The old Jewish liturgy does not recognize their presence.

Older than the Jewish liturgy are the sacred books of the Hindoos. The famous passage of the "Padma Parana," translated by the Abbé Dubois,[27] has been part of the domestic code of the Hindoos for thousands of years. According to the Hindoo lawgiver, a woman has no god on earth but her husband, and no religion except to gratify, obey, and serve him. Let her husband be crooked, old, infirm, offensive; let him be irascible, irregular, a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee; let him be reckless of his domestic affairs, as if possessed by a devil; though he live in the world without honor; though he be deaf or blind, and wholly weighed down by crime and infirmity—still shall his wife regard him as her god. With all her might shall she serve him, in all things obey him, see no defects in his character, and give him no cause of uneasiness. Nay, more: in every stage of her existence woman lives but to obey—at first her parents, next her husband and his parents, and in her old age she must be ruled by her children. Never during her whole life can she be under her own control.

These are the general principles upon which the life of women in India is to be conducted. The Hindoo writer was considerate enough to add a few particulars: "If her husband laughs, she ought to laugh; if he weeps, she ought to weep; if he is disposed to speak, she ought not to join in the conversation. Thus is the goodness of her nature displayed. What woman would eat till her husband has first had his fill? If he abstains, she will surely fast also; if he is sad, will she not be sorrowful? and if he is gay, will she not leap for joy? In the absence of her husband her raiment will be mean." Such has been the conception of woman's duty to man by all the half-developed races from time immemorial, and such to this day are the tacit demand and expectation of the brutalized males of the more advanced races. Gavarni, married, would have been content with no subservience much short of that.

Happily, nature has given to woman the means of a fell revenge, for she usually holds the peace of the household and the happiness of all its members in her hands. The satirical works that come to us from the Oriental lands teem with evidence that women have always known how to get a fair share of domestic authority. If they are slaves, they have ever been adepts in the arts and devices of slaves. The very squaws of our Indians often contrive to rule their brawny lords. Is not the whole history of the war between the sexes included in the little story of the manner in which Pocahontas was entrapped on board a British vessel lying in the James River two hundred and fifty years ago? The captain had promised to the aunt of this dusky princess the gift of a copper kettle if she would bring her niece to the ship; and accordingly one afternoon, when she found herself on the river-bank with her husband and Pocahontas, she was suddenly seized with a longing to go on board, saying that this was the third time the ship had been in their river, and yet she had never visited it. Her grumpy old husband refusing, she began to cry, and then, Pocahontas joining her entreaties, of course the old man had to unfasten his canoe and paddle them off to the vessel. This model couple returned to the shore poorer by a niece of uncertain character, and richer by the inestimable treasure of a copper kettle. What fine lady could have managed this delicate affair better? Is it not thus that tickets, trinkets, and dresses are won every day in the cities of the modern world?

The well-known epigram of Palladas upon marriage expresses a thought which has been uttered by satirists in every form of which language is capable:

"In marriage are two happy things allowed—
A wife in wedding garb and in her shroud.
Who, then, dares say that state can be accurst
Where the last day's as happy as the first?"