enced the psychology of the American people it is not easy to determine, yet I am inclined to think it cannot have been without influence. The position of the modern American woman is the amazement of the world; in America the worship and glorification of woman is supposed to be the national cult; we are taught to believe that woman is the principal object of creation and that the world revolves around her, man being only secondary, and existing merely for her pleasure and to provide for her wants and luxuries. A distinguished American sociologist carries the national belief so far as to advance, as an original discovery, "the gynæcocentric theory"; that is, the proposition that the female sex is primary and the male secondary in the organic scheme; or, as he puts it in another form, "the male is a mere afterthought of Nature.”1

It has always been a surprising thing to foreigners that American women took no part in politics, for it seemed to them that America would naturally be the one country of all others in which women would be an active force. The existence of the Salic Law explains this seeming anomaly. The road to political preferment is closed to women. No woman can hope to be President or Governor or a member of the Cabinet; but it may be said no Frenchwoman can aspire to be President of the Republic, and no Englishwoman can expect to be Prime Minister. This is true, but in France the tradition of a woman

1 Ward: Pure Sociology, p. 296 et seq.

at the head of the state is still powerful to exercise its force; in England women have reigned, so that the position of women in England, historically as well as traditionally and socially, is entirely different from what it is in America. Historical evolution in England has made woman part of the machinery of government; historical evolution in America has from the first closed the path of government to her.

The present mood of woman in America - her restless, nervous energy, her desire for independence, that independence that comes from being no longer financially dependent upon man, that is driving her into the trades and the professions to compete with man, that is making her seek political rights is the revolt against the subordination to which she has been subjected for three hundred years. During the greater part of that time she has been dissatisfied; she has dimly felt that something was wrong with her world, although the cause escaped her; and not knowing the disease it was impossible to apply the remedy. She was like a little child who thinks the headache is the cause of its fever. For a hundred years or more she has been in fever. Every foreigner, and for the matter of that not an inconsiderable number of Americans, is impressed by the "nervous energy" of the American; but the nervous energy of the American people as a whole can be traced to the mothers of the race, who are straining at the leash that the American man has made for them, who fails to see that it is none the less a leash be

cause it is made of velvet cunningly worked and not infrequently studded with precious stones. The American woman is at last in revolt. She is tired of inferiority and is satiated with luxury and pseudochivalry. She wants what has never been granted to her. She wants the recognition of intellectual and moral equality.

CHAPTER VII

THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA

THREE apparently unrelated causes, beginning toward the last quarter of the seventeenth century, were to bring about that great dynamic movement to be arrested only when the colonies were no longer appanages of the Crown of England, but had become a sovereign nation. In their chronological order they were:

First. The growth of the intellectual movement in Massachusetts, which, leading to the decline of the influence of the Puritan priesthood and the overthrow of the theocratic state, took out of the hands of the church the supreme power and handed it over to the people; broke down the religious barrier which separated the people of the various colonies, and made it possible for them to come together for the purposes of common defense.

Second. The dynastic and political ambitions of England and other European powers which brought the American colonies into the sphere of their military operations and made America part of the great theatre of war.

Third. A policy consistently foolish and shortsighted on the part of England in endeavoring to prevent the material expansion of the colonies and

to exploit them for the benefit of the English merchant and ocean carrier.

Here we have the three great motives in the universal tetralogy,-religion, ambition, greed, that, alone or combined, have always been the moving forces to breathe the breath of life. into peoples and make of them nations or to accelerate their spiritual development. In the New World as in the Old the teachings of history were again to be vindicated.

The historian, "the prophet of the past," can clearly see why it was impossible for the Puritan Commonwealth to survive; and it has been pointed out that the passion of the Puritan for education, the encouragement he gave to intellectual discussion, the insatiable desire to know the meaning of things for which the mind of man can find no solution, was the training to breed revolt against theocratic tyranny and eventually lead to the emancipation of a priest-governed people. It was only a few years after the foundation of the theocracy that this spirit broke out, and to escape from the intolerance of the rulers of the church, Hooker led his little band to the banks of the Connecticut, there to found a new colony where all men should have an equal voice in their own government. We recall that striking figure, Roger Williams, in the infancy of the Bay Colony, whose great soul stifled under the formalism of hair-splitting theologians and who found the freedom he craved in Rhode Island. The