Man has been known as pure reason touched with chivalry and devotion, or else as a dangerous animal who preys upon his kind. There may be--IN some other life or world--representatives of both of these classes, but they are not the men with whom we live, and, therefore, whose acquaintance it is desirable we should make as early as possible.
That a large family is a crown of glory to the parents and an inestimable boon to the state, is an idea running through literature. Is it a fact or is it one of the fictions of fiction which it were well to stimulate and galvanize into life less persistently? What is the answer from reform schools and penal institutions, filled by ignorance and passion held in bondage by poverty; from cemeteries where mothers and babies of the poor and ill-nurtured are strewn like leaves; from, the homes of the educated and well to do where small families are the rule--large ones the deplored exception? What is the logical reply in countries whose sociological students sigh over the struggle for existence and a scarcity of supplies; "over population" and desperate emigration? Misery and vice bearing strict proportion to density of population and poverty, surely offer a hint that at least one of the fictions of fiction has gone far to do a serious injury to man.
But the fiction of fictions which has done more real harm to the human race than any other, perhaps, is the one which dominates it--the idea that woman was created for the benefit and pleasure of man, while man exists for and because of himself.
Fiction has utilized even her hours of leisure and amusement to sap the self-respect of womanhood while it helped very greatly to brutalize and lower man by keeping--in this insidious form--the thought ever before him that woman is a function only and not a person, and that even in this limited sphere she is and should be proud to be man's subject. "He for God only, she for God in him."
It is true that since the advent of women writers fiction has shown a tendency to modify, to a limited extent, this previously universal dictum, but the thought still dominates literature greatly to the detriment of morals and of the dignity of both men and women.
"The woman who has no history is the woman to be envied," says literature--and yet people do not envy her any more than they do the man of like inconspicuous position. No one wishes that she might go down to history, if one may so express it, as history less. No one points with pride to Jane Smith as his illustrious ancestor any more than if Jane had chanced to be John. To have been a Mary Somerville, or an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or a George Eliot, most historyless women would be willing to change places even now, and as for "those who come after," can there be a question as to which would give more pride or pleasure to man or woman, to say--"I am the son, or the brother, or the niece of Mrs. Browning," or to say, "Jane Smith, of Amityville, is my most famous relative?"