numerous enough to demoralise the imaginations of any large number; they are now a perceptible cause of ambition and unrest. On the other hand, the various causes that are driving women to make homes for themselves while they have freed society from the worst feature of conventual life, and from the unattractive celibacy of women, who having failed to marry were supposed to have failed in their careers, are assimilating the thoughts and habits of women to the masculine type. The inquiry now often made why there should be a different law of morality for the two sexes could scarcely have been formulated as lately as a century ago; and it may be questioned if women are not likely to lose something rare and inappreciable if it comes to be recognised that there is no special ideal for wives and daughters. Human nature may probably be trusted to keep its own boundary lines; and the old trick of thought that regards fearlessness in word and act as the true virtue of the man, and sexual purity as that of the woman, will not easily be unlearned. Meanwhile, for the present at least, it seems as if there were an unsettlement of ideas that may lead for a generation or more to much ferment of thought and irregularity of aim and instability of character. The license of some notoriously depraved courts is never likely to be exceeded, or even reached. It is even probable, perhaps, that as women are more and more occupied with serious interests they will be less and less tempted to be frail. What it seems most reasonable to apprehend is, that the old instinctive virtue will be replaced by a calculating common sense, which may easily become a calculating compliance; and that while family life in general will be as inviolable as heretofore, it will lose the sense of religious sanction, and continue to exist only because it is
