April 15th, 1882. tition would keep the fees down to what can be paid; the opportunities of training should therefore be wide. Perhaps the nurses might be trained in the work-houses, under the work-house doctor. But any doctor who can show he has trained a midwife might claim a fee from Government for his service. If the training is to be restricted to certain places and certain schools, the numbers trained will never be sufficient, and as in the case of the Peabody Buildings, the class of persons assisted will not be those in the greatest need. But if the supply of midwives could be greatly increased much good would be done, and the quality of the help obtainable by the poor would gradually imL. B. prove. Biarritz. REVIEWS. Common Sense about Women, by THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. Boston, U.S.A., Lee & Shepard. IF Colonel Higginson's name had not already become a household word with us for fearless striving after truth, and noble self-renunciation in forwarding by action. what he had upheld by speech, if his gallant leadership of the First South Carolina loyal regiment (negro troops) at a time when every officer of a black regiment was under sentence of death in the Southern capital, was forgotten, if we had never heard his genial and thoughtful utterances when a visitor a few years since in London, this plain common-sense book about women would be sufficient to place him in the van of our workers and thinkers. It is, we believe, composed mainly, if not entirely, of the articles contributed by him to the Woman's Journal, in Boston, U.S.A. Each essay is very short, but each contains some clear gem of crystallised thought which renders it of immense value. There is absolute justice, or striking illustration, absolute fairness, and uncompromising truth-telling in every page. If he thinks April 15th, 1882. an argument is wrong, or a course of action unwise, he does not hesitate to say so, because it might seem like fault-finding with his own party. Women have suffered as frequently from flattery as from denigration—they have had their mouths stopped as often by a sugarplum of compliment as by a blow or an insult, and both systems have been equally fatal to a clear commonsense view being taken about their claims, their difficulties and their rights. For ease of reference the essays in this books have been divided under specified heads:-Physiology, Temperament, The Home, Society, Education, Employment, Principles of Government, Suffrage, and the Objections to Suffrage. These last have naturally been more often quoted than others. In all, one principle is insisted on, that the same standard of rectitude, of morality, of honour, should be held before women as before men. "It is better," he says, "not to base any plea for woman on the ground of her angelic superiority. The argument proves too much. If she is already so perfect, there is every inducement to let well alone. It suggests the expediency of conforming man's condition to hers, instead of conforming hers to man's. If she is a winged creature, and man can only crawl, it is his condition that needs mending." In another place (page 350) he criticises an objection which we hear made fully as often in England as in America, that though women have an abstract right to vote, the conduct of the existing women into whose hands this change would throw the power, makes the objector trust the power will not be conceded till education shall have prepared a class of women fit to take the responsibilities -which is until the objector shall not meet or hear of any woman who takes a different view on important subjects, or possibly only matters of taste, to his own. Whatever else happens we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The first step towards the enfranchisement of women will blow to the winds the tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just as surely as women vote, we shall have occasionally women politicians, women corruptionists and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of courtesy, that none such now exist, they will be born as instantaneously after enfranchisement as the frogs begin to pipe in the spring. What then? Suppose women are not "as gods, April 15th, 1882. knowing good and evil": they are not to be emancipated as gods but as fallible human beings. They are to come out of an ignorant innocence that may be only weakness, into a wise innocence that will be strength. The position of women in marriage is the subject of many of Col. Higginson's essays. He speaks of the pain and annoyance of continually being dependent on another's will for money supplies. I have carefully avoided using the word "allowance" in what has been said, because that word seems to imply the untrue and mean assumption that the money is all the husband's to give or withhold as he will. Yet I have heard this sort of phrase from men who were living on a wife's property, or a wife's earnings; from men who nominally kept boarding-houses, working a little, while their wives worked hard,- -or from farmers, who worked hard, and made their wives work harder. Even in cases where the wife has no direct part in the money-making, the indirect part she performs, if she takes faithful charge of his household, is so essential, so beyond all compensation in money, that it is an utter shame and impertinence in the husband when he speaks of "giving money to his wife, as if it were an act of favour. It is no more an act of favour than when the business manager of a firm pays out money to the unseen partner who directs the indoor business or runs the machinery. Be the joint income more or less, the wife has a claim to her honourable share, and that as a matter of right, without the daily ignominy of sending in a petition for it. And again There was a tradition in a town where I once lived, that a certain Quaker who had married a fortune, was once heard to repel his wife who had asked him for money in a public place, with the response, "Rachel, where is that ninepence I gave thee yesterday?" When I read in Scribner's Monthly an article deriding the right to representation of the Massachusetts women who pay two millions of tax on 134,000,000 dollars of property, asserting that they produced nothing of it; that it was only" men who produced this wealth, and bestowed it upon these women," that it was "all drawn from land and sea by the hands of men whose largess testifies alike of their love and their munificence," I must say that I am reminded of Rachael's ninepence. If the real keynote of his counsels to men is to do justice, that of his advice to women is to be thorough. "You cannot," he says, separate woman's rights and her responsibilities. In all ages of the world she has had a certain limited work to do, and has done that well. All that is needed, when new spheres are open, is that she should carry the same fidelity into those. If she will work as hard to shape the children of her brain as to rear her bodily offspring, will do intellectual work as well as she does housework, and will meet her moral responsibilities as she meets her social engagements, then April 15th, 1882.. opposition will soon disappear. The habit of thoroughness is the key to all high success. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. Only those who are faithful in a few things will rightfully be made rulers over many. It would be impossible to find space to make all the quotations we should like. If the book should become popular on this side of the Atlantic, and we think it only needs an enterprising English publisher to become so, it will do much towards raising the public appreciation of women's capabilities, and to spread the desire of extending them justice. James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches. Sampson, Low & Co. This is one of the most interesting biographies we have seen for a long time. Mr. Fields was the chief partner of the great American publishing firm, Ticknor & Fields, and as such was in close correspondence with all the best known American men of letters, and with many English authors and artists. The book is enriched with hitherto unpublished letters and anecdotes of Hawthorne, Landor, Miss Mitford, Agassiz, Bryant, Holmes, Whittier, Dickens, and others. Mr. Fields by his generosity and readiness to help, made the little office at the back of his shop the resort of all who wanted advice or assistance. He did more than any man to make Americans acquainted with the best English literature. He had an intuitive comprehension of genius, and was in the habit of deciding quickly upon the merit of any work offered to his notice. He had not time to write much himself amidst the pressure of business, although he was a man of indefatigable industry. A diary, contributed by Mrs. Fields, adds much to the interest of the work. The following extract from a letter of Mrs. Livermore will shew more than any other quotation how specially women were indebted to him. He had asked her to write a book on the work that the women had done during the civil war-"the heavenly side of the war:" My interest in Mr. Fields dates from that day. I never afterwards heard his name spoken, or saw it mentioned in the papers without recalling his courtesy, and kindness, and thinking of him as a man to whom a woman might go for advice and assistance. Years afterwards, when I had returned to New England to reside, April 15th, 1882. I remember how all who believed in the enfranchisement of women were thrilled with his speech, made I believe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In strong and grand words he expressed his sympathy with the struggling reform, not as hopeful in its promise as now, pronouncing it founded on eternal justice, and predicting its ultimate success at no very remote day. Glad and grateful I hastened to write him a note of thanks, and to tell him of the good cheer his words had given us. His reply was even stronger and more earnest than his public address; and the brief note soon found its way into one of the autograph albums, arranged and sold in aid of a public charity. Once more, Mr. Fields increased woman's indebtedness to him by organizing and successfully carrying out a free course of twelve lectures for women on English literature. So excellent were they, and so highly prized, that hardly was the large hall sufficient for the accommodation for those who sought to attend them. We had all come to recognise in Mr. Fields a friend of women, who desired for her equal educational and legal advantages with man. If he arranged for women a course of literary lectures, his programme included women lecturers as well as men. If, at his charming summer retreat by the sea, he provided a series of Sunday discourses for his townspeople, he invited women to the pulpit, which he temporarily controlled, and gave them the same hearty welcome he accorded to clergymen. Was a women in doubt concerning the worth of her undelivered lecture or untried essay? He placed his time, talent and experience at her service, criticising so kindly as to win her gratitude, even when the criticism was severe. Ay, and when sometimes an unasked loan of money was needed, because of the poverty of the would be debutante, it was voluntarily tendered; and I have heard Mr. Fields declare that rarely were such debts unpaid. In conservative and cultivated circles where his interest in woman's advancement was not known, in the far West where his advocacy of woman's suffrage had never been advertised, he was as generous in his recognition, and as just in his demands for woman as in the society where this had come to be expected of him. He never passed me in the street so hurriedly that he had not time for a word of cheer or encouragement, or an enquiry into the progress of a reform, in which he believed as strongly as myself. It is not yet possible for me to realize that all this is over, that these kindnesses are ended, that his work is finished. For he was so full of life and heartiness, that it is impossible to think of him as having passed into the land of silence Mr. Fields died in April, 1881. that Longfellow ever wrote were in memory of James T. Fields: Then only for a season Almost the last lines "Auf Wiedersehen," Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain He has not been long behind him, |