Democratic Tendencies in the 19th C

even in a weary road, the skies grow kindly and familiar while a sudden glory shines through them, so to man the earth has gained both homeliness and splendor. He looks about him with a new wonder and delight. He puts a friendlier hand on grass and [illegible] and bird and his fellow man. He feels at home.

In the nineteenth century, then, man's old time pride in a unique origin and destiny

he yielded up, and gained instead a strange sweet sense of fraternity, of the pulsing of the kindred blood in a myriad veins of earth's creatures. But the reader of its literature must feel that the same century saw another change as marked as this and tending to a similar end, a change in the attitude of men and women to each other and to their common destiny.

Man and woman, coeval and consanguineous,

dependent on each other for life and love and fortune, indissolubly linked by the very force that bade them be; together denizens of earth for how many ages, together feeling the sun shine and the rain beat; weeping, laughing, loving together — how was any change possible here that should deepen their sense of nearness, bring these two more nearly to a oneness and intermingling and not rather tear them

asunder and destroy them?

To appeal to literature for evidence of a better understanding between men and women, of a clearer perception of the tie that binds them, a deepening conciousness of their mutual dependence, an increasing respect and fellowship between them, may seem to invite discomfiture. Instantly in many minds will rise the specter of the problem novel and play. We all know them,

have all been more or less affected by them with their pictures of an irrepressible conflict between the sexes, their images of the chase in which the woman is pursued and man the pursuer, images of the duel in which now woman is borne down by the sheer strength of her antagonist, and now man is foiled and helpless, beaten by the subtle fencing of his foe. Phelps Ward's saying — that God was cruel when