MISS COBBE ON THE DUTIES OF WOMEN.*

Tins is in many respects the most telling of Miss Cobbe's books, full of life, spirit, and aggressiveness. She quotes in one of these lectures a saying of the late Matthew Davenport Hill, that " it is difficult to estimate sufficiently the aggressive power of love and kindness." Nor is it easy to estimate sufficiently the aggressive power of Miss Cobbe, who is in many ways a synonym for love and kindness,—though love and kindness -which, like the stick that beat down. Mr. Pecksnift, we some- times regret to feel has "knobs on it." We should be sorry to meet Miss Cobbe in any less aggressive atti- tude. We should. fear she was preparing to take leave of her ordinary sphere of activity in this world, if we missed the rap which so often precedes or follows the sunny smile. But it does amuse us a little to hear her speaking with such vast indignation of the men who attack her sex generally, when there is a running fire of irony, and sometimes even sub- dued invective, against men, penetrating the whole substance .of her book. This is how she proposes to treat men who are more or less disrespectful to the sex of women in the House of 'Commons, or elsewhere :- " And once again, I think, it behoves us women to use our immense social influence in utterly discouraging and patting down those at- tacks upon our sex generally, which in Parliament and in certain newspapers, afford just the same refined and elevated amusement -which our ancestors found in the public recreation for which the pious Alleyne liberally:contributed, namely, ' Whipping of the Blind

Bear !' Those debates in Parliament wherein certain facetious speakers distinguish themselves, are they not very like whipping of the blind bear I° We are up in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, like the bear tied to its stake, unable to deal our tor. mentors oven a dab with our paws, while they are diverting them- selves, i

giving us the heaviest cuts which their cart-whips can inflict. Truly it is a gallant and gentlemanly sport, and one of which it Appears these Members of Parliament will not soon tire. But is it -quite consistent with our dignity as women that the men who say and write these things should be just as welcome to us, just as free to enter our drawing-rooms, as those generous friends who stand by us year after year, and bear for our sakes and the sake of justice, the -scoffs and sneers levelled at them as our champions P There is, it seems to me, a terrible want of esprit de corps among women ; an un- meaning readiness to smile equally at every man,—or perhaps, I ought in some cases to say, rather a base and servile willingness to flatter men by pretending to agree with them in their contempt for the claims of women. Were women only united in common feeling, And the insult done to the sex generally felt by every woman as a wrong and insult to herself, did every woman say (transposing the old Roman poet's words), I am a Woman, and nothing which con- • The Dutiett of Women : a Course of Lectums. By Frances Power Cobbe. London; Williams and Norgate.

corns women is alien to me,' then this sort of thing would bo put down very shortly."

But she loves nothing so well as to retaliate that kind of treat- ment. For example :— " Of course, no woman can be so doll or observation as not to know that men are invariably flattered by the abject appeal of a woman (especially if she be young and pretty) to save her from some transient peril—a runaway horse—a swaying boat—an irascible bull. Obviously it makes the smallest masculine soul well with Herculean glory to be clasped round the arms (or in extreme cases, the legs), and beseeched to exhibit the heroism of his sex Possibly- he may be shaking in his shoes, and the application to help anybody but himself may be rather inopportune, especially if the suppliant be plain or elderly I once asked a dentist whether gentlemen or ladies gave him most trouble ? and he replied, 0, gentlemen, beyond question. I operated upon a groat many officers just before they wont to the Crimean war, and I assure you that many of them who are now Balaklava and inkerman heroes behaved in a very unheroic way indeed in the chair in which you are sitting ! Women scream a little, but are always ready to thank me for what I do for them. Men moan, and groan, and abuse me !' It would be amusing to inquire whether other dentists make similar reports. . . . . The making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right ; a right which no man can take from us, for. a man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive. He can build a castle or a palace, but, poor creature ! be he wise as Solomon and rich as Cronus, he cannot turn it into a home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only a woman ; a woman all by herself if she likes, and without any man to help her, who can turn a house into a home. Woo to the wretched man who disputes her monopoly, and thinks, because he can arrange a club, he can make a home. Nemesis overtakes hint in his old-bachelorhood, when a home becomes the supreme ideal of his desires ; and we see him—him who scorned the home-making of a lady—obliged to put up with the oppression of his cook, or the cruelty of his nurse !'

No doubt there is more or less truth in most of these taunts, while the last is ,literally true. But is it quite worthy of Miss Cobbe to be so angry with the manglers of the female sex; when she herself so thoroughly enjoys running a pin into a man, simply because he is a man, and not a woman P For our own parts, we would say that each sex is too dependent on the other to be seriously alienated by the habit of exchanging mutual

sneers. Still, as sneering really comes to very little either way, —and that little is mischievous, so far as it goes,—we should.

hardly think it had tended to Miss Cobbe's great purpose in publishing these lectures, either to exhort her own sex to regard as social crimes,. depreciating views of women held by men, or

to pay these depreciating views buck by her own lively taunts. If men are often a little weak in liking to be asked for protection by-women, and not always up to the mark in courage, that is no

worse than for women to be proud, as they so often are, of the softening and mellowing influence of their disinterestedness and tact, and then to fail, as they so often do, at the very point where disinterestedness and tact are most required. This is barren war which the sexes wage. Of course, both sexes often pride themselves exactly on what they fail in, and of course all faulty beings will at times do the same.

However, the object of these admirable lectures is not to gird at men, which Miss Cobbe does only incidentally, and as well as that sort of thing is ever done,—we should not call the lectures ad- mirable, if it were,—but to enforce on women who are growing up to the greater freedom of modern ideas as to their functions and duties, that they must not leave behind them the old moral ideal of women, but on the contrary, study more sedulously than ever to preserve it, amid the new temptations and new difficulties of their enlarged conceptions of right and duty. Miss Cobbe's attack on the looser standard of feminine conduct which has more or less accompanied the larger opportunities opened. to women, and especially what

she says on the vast importance of their keeping up their in- fluence in the household, and not taking from home what

they give to other avocations, is admirably said,—with just that dash of practical knowledge and freshness of humour which takes from it all appearance of conventionality or goodi- ness. It would be hard, we think, to find sounder doctrine or doctrine more especially adapted to the temptations of the pre- sent age than the following, on the limits of what women (or men, for that matter) owe to others :-

" Do not bo shocked or startled if I lay it down as an unquestionable principle that personal duties have supreme obligation and must never be postponed to social ones. I must explain this doctrine fully. We hear a great deal of social duty in these days under the name of • Altruism; and, as much of the philosophy of the hour has relegated God to the land of shadows, and cut off from man that hope of Immortality which gives to virtue its infinite extension, it follows of course that social duty must come to be considered as the supreme and only real moral obligation, and oven the most sacred personal duties end in being ranked and estimated according to the influence they happen to exercise on the welfare of the community. I cannot too strenuously express my dissent from this entire view of morality. As I believe that virtue is a far higher thing—a more desirable thing even to the weukost of us, than happiness, so (as I have just said), I believe that we have been made primarily for virtue, and only secondarily, and as far as may be compatible with our primary end, for happiness,—and I cannot listen to the base theory of human exist- ence which makes of such things as truth, and purity, and holiness of heart, only convenient characteristics tending generally to make the community in which they abound a little more orderly and com- fortable. On the contrary, I believe that the individual himself—the community itself—the very material world itself,—all exist for the purpose that human spirits may rise through the paths of mortal excellence up into loftier regions of purity, love, and holiness, to a beatitude compared to which our poor happiness of earth will be utterly forgotten. Therefore I hold that whenever personal and social duties seem to come into collision, the personal duty must have the precedence. We must not sacrifice our truthfulness, and chastity, and temperance, in the vain hope of benefiting our neigh- bours, for these two plain reasons : first, because, as virtue is the true end of our being, and we can only choose virtue for ourselves, and not for another, and can never make anybody else virtuous (only in an indirect way help him to virtue), it follows that it is absurd to postpone our own virtue to any lesser object, And, secondly, because we can never really benefit anybody by doing wrong on his behalf, and the truest and surest way in which we can serve our follow-men is, not so much to do anything for them, as to be the very truest, purest, noblest beings we know how. This is, I fear, a hard lesson to take to heart, and you will pardon me if, in addressing women, I dwell on it specially because I think it is a matter on which the most generous-natured women are most apt to err. There have been hun- dreds of women who, like Judith of old, or like the piteous poverty- stricken mother in Les Misdrables, will sacrifice their chastity to serve their race or their children. There are thousands, tens of thousands of women who, like the wife of ' Auld Robin Gray,' have made unloving marriages (which are in truth, though not in name, unchaste likewise) to aid their parents in distress, and even to gratify their wishes. And again, there are thousands of women (and of men also) who are ready to sacrifice their veracity to do charitable actions; to conceal some one's faults, or help some one to employment ; and in short, to bear false witness for their neighbours—the reverse of the noble and sweet examples of Jeannie Deans and Mary Barton. And lastly, there are millions of women throughout the world whose free• dom is wholly robbed from them, and who for all moral purposes are little better than slaves, and who submit patiently to this under the notion that it is a duty to husband or father. Now on every one of theme kinds of se?f-oblations the same sentence must be passed. They are mistakes,—often generous, affecting, heart-rending mistakes,— but always mistakes. No good can ever come of them. The highest ends of human life are spoiled by them, and the benefit they aim at is never worth that which is forfeited."

With the general estimate of women's duties and powers which this little book contains, we profoundly agree, though we differ from Miss Cobbe in her conception of the forms which " public spirit" in a woman ought to take. That every woman and every man should interest herself or himself, so far as it is possible, in the life of the State, as well as in the life of the family, we have always held. That every woman should use her public spirit in the same way as every man, we do not think, and believe that she diminishes instead of increasing her public influence by it, just as she would diminish instead of increasing her real influence over the policy of national armies and national wars by insisting on raising and disciplining regiments of women, to share with men the physical labour of troops in the field. It seems to us a mistake to suppose that an influence which is very great, though wielded indirectly, will be necesarily in- creased by gaining for itself a direct influence. It may be greatly diminished by that means,—just, for instance, as the political influence of moral character would, undoubtedly, be immensely diminished by any attempt to assign directly to character, as such, a political weight in the State at all proportioned to that which it wields indirectly. The first result we should expect from the granting of the suffrage generally to women would be, not an increase, but a diminution, of their real influ- ence over elections. At present, instructed women exercise a vast political influence, because they influence, all the more for their being non-combatants, the votes of the men who are known to them. Once let them have their own votes to register, once let them be combatants, instead of non-combatants, and in gaining the position of belligerents, we believe they would lose a vast deal of that properly feminine influence which belongs to them as non-belligerents.

We observe that Miss Cobbe indulges in a very natural and legitimate triumph over this journal for having taken, in 1862, a very different line from hers as to the policy of admitting women to the same academical degrees to which men are ad-

mitted. Looking back to the article to which she refers, we find it certainly wanting in the proper appreciation of one weighty consideration,—the vast importance to those women who have to compete with men, as, for instance, in the capacity of

inspectors of schools or teachers in schools, or doctors,—of a com- mon test. For women who wish to discharge the same duties as men, and who are competent, as many women are, to discharge them better than most men, it is, of course, imperative that they should have access to the same tests of capacity ; and this. is the consideration which has practically beaten all others out of the field. Still, we believe that what we wrote in 1862 is not only true, but is likely to be soon verified,—namely, that the result of admitting women to the same intellectual tests as men,. instead of adapting those tests more to the tastes and physique of average women, will be this, that while it will raise the standard of exceptionally strong or exceptionally able women's. education, it will discourage very much 'the average young woman, who is by no means up to the same amount of hard work as the average man of the same age, from attempting to pass, at all events at the age at which alone she is likely to try to pass, this intellectual test at all. We have given a great boon to the strongest and hardiest or cleverest of the sex, at the expense, we fear,. of the higher education of average girls, who would much oftener have studied for degrees, if a standard specially adapted for women had been proposed for them. We do not doubt that what has been done is right, but we do doubt whether it will operate so well for the majority of girls, as would a course of instruction and examination more carefully adapted to the physical qualifications and intellectual tastes of average girls. Perhaps the clever women, who take their rank high amongst the ablest of the other sex, will come to see this, and will exert themselves before long to establish secondary diplomas adapted to the ordinary physique and tastes of average girls. Of course, it was natural enough that the strongest and ablest of the sex should have got their want supplied the soonest ; and their want was rather to show that they could do as well as, or better than, the men with whom they wished to compete, than to raise the general standard of female education. We believe that after the first crop of female intellect is reaped, we shall find that the pre- sent standards of the higher education do not attract nearly no. large a proportion of female students as they ought to attract, or else that great complaints of overwork will be made by the parents of average girls who try to come up to them. Recog nising to the full the mistake we made in 1862 in not seeing that the immediate want was to enable vigorous young women to compare themselves accurately with men of the same calibre, we still think that the substance of what we then said—in no scornful or condescending spirit—in relation to the education of average girls, was sound.

We have not drawn attention to many of the strongest points of Miss Cobbe's lectures,—to her truly admirable remarks, for instance, on the duty of social cheerfulness, and on the duty of both physical and social courage for women. Nothing could be better said than what she says on these heads. And what is best in the whole book is that she founds her teaching for women so strongly in the deepest and simplest moral principles, that her thoughts come with a force and a breadth which win for them at once a respectful hearing.