THE COMING YRANNY.

Evening Star, Issue 10872, 4 March 1899, Page 1

THE COMING YRANNY.

The 20th century has decided to be an age of action, and not of reflection, if the currents and eddies on the social stream of the 19th be accepted as prognostics. The philosophers, from Mr Herbert Spencer downwards, are treated with indifference; the men and women of action are to be our future guides. The thinkers and talkers will be shelved; already the cult of materialism has ousted those sentimental gods of British idolatry dear to the mid-Victorian period. No wonder that "conversation as a fine art" is dead, in spite of those antiquated professors who practise it vainly among a generation which has forgotten how to listen. . . . The young woman of the future, athletic and unashamed, with some three inches added to her stature, will not ba satisfied to take that " back seat" which th« manners and customs of the 18th century found for her, and against which she waged successful war throughout these later days. It is a thing which I do not like to say openly and from my housetop; but I am persuaded, before two more generations have passed, that proposals of marriage will come from women! As it is, the more daring of the sex do not scruple to demand the hand of eligible but retiring bachelors in the critical moments of courtship. Look around you for a moment; consider the crowd of vigorous young women, with their golf clubs, their bicycles, their hockey sticks, and their intolerance of the social straitwaistcoat that Mrs Grundy (now senile and on the verge of dissolution) bids them wear! Do you expect these elegant viragoes (I use the word in a polite sense if there be one) to sit down meekly and wait to be wooed ? Certainly not! The race is to the " fast," the battle to the despiser of tradition; and the custom—already in abeyance—which requires the female of the human race to wait for the man's proposal will, 1" predict, be reversed. For women have discovered that they desire, not political emancipation, as some poor sages still imagine, but emancipation from the trammels of sex. .... Woman, the social despot of the second half of the 20th century, will be supported in becoming splendor and comfort by the wage-earning male! Even Wisdom and Science will sit at her feet and listen to her when—as already in America —she talks with magnificent ignorance of things which she does not understand. To this consummation the world is steadily moving. Already woman's hand is on Society's crown, although the dull male crowd feeding in the pastures of politics j or business perceive it not! —' Critic'