But a woman, however poor she may be, and burdened with claims upon her relationship, cannot try to do what Portia did not need to do unless her talent can justify the attempt. If she presumes upon the deference which man spontaneously pays to her sex, or calculates that curiosity will be piqued to see her exhibition, she cannot, even with the help of her natural allies, flowers, costume, and manner, long conceal some inadequacy for the part she aspires to play. Then she will wreak discredit upon the independence of woman; and, if that be the special cause which she advocates, her presence on the platform will be an advertisement of its failure. For mankind, which has invented the motto for woman which styles her the weaker sex, does not like to be taken at its word, and will not sit patiently where this weakness bores it. It withdraws into the retreats where this accredited weakness is a delight and power. Of course, wherever masculine ineffectiveness appears, men are put out by it, except in a meeting-house; and there it is tolerated in deference to numerous tea-drinkings, marriages and funerals, and hours of pastoral gentleness; and the imminent inadequacy of speech is arrested by the organ. But the platform has neither tradition nor liturgy: the gaze of the audience is a _mitrailleuse_ that sweeps it. There is no rose-window to throw a tint on bloodless speech. Men compromise no truth of their own, and damage no cause when they refrain from listening; for man is already the proprietor of all that he desires, and more than he deserves. This is not the case with woman,--not, at least, in the regions where there are too many mouths and too scanty subsistence; nor in those where cultivated women cherish an interest in equality of opportunities; nor in those where the public law discriminates against them; nor in those where woman dislikes the liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the taxing. It is all the more incumbent upon women to be jealously careful that their self-respect, at least, should be adequately represented. They defeat their own thought when they applaud the thin speech which sometimes lends its want of voice to it. It is a "childish treble" that "pipes and whistles in its sound." There is no reason, because its piping and whistling were never tolerated before, that the new chance should confer immunity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, for either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal nature, the laws of mind and the moods of feeling, combine to take a mortgage upon it, whose interest must be paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by the gifts that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will come when a superior womanhood shall remand masculine incapacity swiftly to the oblivion it deserves, whenever it mars blocks of marble, squanders paint, debauches music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion, and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman restrained from the dilettantism of modern times!