With Her in Ourland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Published: 1916

Categorie(s): Fiction, Literary, Science Fiction, Dystopia and uchronia

Source: Forerunner magazine

Part 1
Synopsis of Herland

Three American young men discover a country inhabited solely by women, who were Parthenogenetic, and had borne only girl children for two thousand years; they marry three of the women. Two of the men and one woman leave the country of Herland to return to America; Jeff Margrave remaining with his wife, Celis, a willing citizen; Terry O. Nicholson being expelled for bad conduct; and Ellador electing to go with her husband, Vandyck Jennings.

Part 2
With Her in Ourland

Chapter 1 The Return

THE three of us, all with set faces of high determination, sat close in the big biplane as we said goodbye to Herland and rose whirring from the level rock on that sheer edge. We went up first, and made a wide circuit, that my wife Ellador might have a view of her own beloved land to remember. How green and fair and flower-brightened it lay below us! The little cities, the thick dotted villages, the scattered hamlets and wide parks of grouped houses lay again beneath our eyes as when we three men had first set our astonished masculine gaze on this ultra-feminine land. 

Our long visit, the kind care, and judicious education given us, even though under restraint, and our months of freedom and travel among them, made it seem to me like leaving a second home. The beauty of the place was borne in upon me anew as I looked down on it. It was a garden, a great cultivated park, even to its wildest forested borders, and the cities were ornaments to the landscape, thinning out into delicate lace-like tracery of scattered buildings as they merged into the open country. 

Terry looked at it with set teeth. He was embittered through and through, and but for Ellador I could well imagine the kind of things he would have said. He only made this circuit at her request, as one who said: "Oh, well—an hour or two more or less—it's over, anyhow!" 

Then the long gliding swoop as we descended to our sealed motor-boat in the lake below. It was safe enough. Perhaps the savages had considered it some deadly witch-work and avoided it; at any rate, save for some dents and scratches on the metal cover, it was unhurt. 

With some careful labor, Terry working with a feverish joyful eagerness, we got the machine dissembled and packed away, pulled in the anchors, and with well-applied oiling started the long disused motor, and moved off toward the great river. 

Ellador's eyes were on the towering cliffs behind us. I gave her the glass, and as long as we were on the open water her eyes dwelt lovingly on the high rocky border of her home. But when we shot under the arching gloom of the forest she turned to me with a little sigh and a bright, steady smile. 

"That's good-bye," she said. "Now it's all looking forward to the Big New World—the Real World—with You!" 

Terry said very little. His heavy jaw was set, his eyes looked forward, eagerly, determinedly. He was polite to Ellador, and not impolite to me, but he was not conversational. 

We made the trip as fast as was consistent with safety; faster, sometimes; living on our canned food and bottled water, stopping for no fresh meat; shooting down the ever-widening river toward the coast. 

Ellador watched it all with eager, childlike interest. The freshness of mind of these Herland women concealed their intellectual power. I never quite got used to it. We are so used to seeing our learned men cold and solemn, holding themselves far above all the "enthusiasm of youth," that it is hard for us to associate a high degree of wisdom and intellectual power with vivid interest in immediate events. 

Here was my Wife from Wonderland, leaving all she had ever known,—a lifetime of peace and happiness and work she loved, and a whole nation of friends, as far as she knew them; and starting out with me for a world which I frankly told her was full of many kinds of pain and evil. She was not afraid. It was not sheer ignorance of danger, either. I had tried hard to make her understand the troubles she would meet. Neither was it a complete absorption in me—far from it. In our story books we read always of young wives giving up all they have known and enjoyed "for his sake." That was by no means Ellador's position. She loved me—that I knew, but by no means with that engrossing absorption so familiar to our novelists and their readers. Her attitude was that of some high ambassador sent on an important and dangerous mission. She represented her country, and that with a vital intensity we can hardly realize. She was to meet and learn a whole new world, and perhaps establish connections between it and her own dear land.

As Terry held to his steering, grim and silent, that feverish eagerness in his eyes, and a curb on his usually ready tongue, Ellador would sit in the bow, leaning forward, chin on her hand, her eyes ahead, far ahead, down the long reaches of the winding stream, with an expression such as one could imagine on Columbus. She was glad to have me near her. I was not only her own, in a degree she herself did not yet realize, but I was her one link with the homeland. So I sat close and we talked much of the things we saw and more of what we were going to see. Her short soft hair, curly in the moist air, and rippling back from her bright face as we rushed along, gave the broad forehead and clear eyes a more courageous look than ever. That finely cut mobile mouth was firmly set, though always ready to melt into a tender smile for me.

"Now Van, my dear," she said one day, as we neared the coast town where we hoped to find a steamer, "Please don't worry about how all this is going to affect me. You have been drawing very hard pictures of your own land, and of the evil behavior of men; so that I shall not be disappointed or shocked too much. I won't be, dear. I understand that men are different from women—must be, but I am convinced that it is better for the world to have both men and women than to have only one sex, like us. We have done the best we could, we women, all alone. We have made a nice little safe clean garden place and lived happily in it, but we have done nothing whatever for the rest of the world. We might as well not be there for all the good it does anyone else. The savages down below are just as savage, for all our civilization. Now you, even if you were, as you say, driven by greed and sheer love of adventure and fighting—you have gone all over the world and civilized it."

"Not all, dear," I hastily put in. "Not nearly all. There are ever so many savages left."

"Yes I know that, I remember the maps and all the history and geography you have taught me."

It was a never-ending source of surprise to me the way those Herland women understood and remembered. It must have been due to their entirely different system of education. There was very much less put into their minds, from infancy up, and what was there seemed to grow there—to stay in place without effort. All the new facts we gave them they had promptly hung up in the right places, like arranging things in a large well-planned, not over-filled closet, and they knew where to find them at once.

"I can readily see," she went on, "that our pleasant collective economy is like that of bees and ants and such co-mothers ; and that a world of fathers does not work as smoothly as that. We have observed, of course, among animals, that the instincts of the male are different from those of the female, and that he likes to fight. But think of all you have done!"

That was what delighted Ellador. She was never tired of my stories of invention and discovery, of the new lands we had found, the mountain ranges crossed, the great oceans turned into highways, and all the wonders of art and science. She loved it as did Desdemona the wild tales of her lover, but with more understanding.

"It must be nobler to have Two," she would say, her eyes shining. "We are only half a people. Of course we love each other, and have advanced our own little country, but it is such a little one— and you have The World !"

We reached the coast in due time, and the town. It was not much of a town, dirty and squalid enough, with lazy halfbreed inhabitants for the most part. But this I had carefully explained and Ellador did not mind it, examining everything with kind impartial eyes, as a teacher would examine the work of atypical children.

Terry loved it. He greeted that slovenly, ill-built, idle place with ardor, and promptly left us to ourselves for the most part.

There was no steamer. None had touched there for many months, they said; but there was a sailing vessel which undertook, for sufficient payment, to take us and our motor-boat with its contents, to a larger port.

Terry and I had our belts with gold and notes; he had letters of credit too, while Ellador had brought with her not only a supply of gold, but a little bag of rubies, which I assured her would take us several times around the world, and more. The money system in Herland was mainly paper, and their jewels, while valued for decoration, were not prized as ours are. They had some historic treasure chests, rivalling those of India, and she had been amply supplied.

After some delay we set sail.

Terry walked the deck, more eager as the days passed. Ellador, I am sorry to say, proved a poor sailor, as was indeed to be expected, but made no fuss about her disabilities. I told her it was almost unescapable, unpleasant but not dangerous, so she stayed in her berth, or sat wrapped mummy fashion on the deck, and suffered in patience.

Terry talked a little more when we were out of her hearing.

"Do you know they say there's a war in Europe ?" he told me.

"A war? A real one—or just the Balkans?"

"A real one, they say—Germany and Austria against the rest of Europe apparently. Began months ago—no news for a long time."

"Oh well—it will be over before we reach home, I guess. Lucky for us we are Americans."

But I was worried for Ellador. I wanted the world, my world, to look its best in her eyes. If those women, alone and unaided, had worked out that pleasant, peaceful, comfortable civilization of theirs, with its practical sisterliness and friendliness all over the land, I was very anxious to show her that men had done at least as well, and in some ways better —men and women, that is. And here we had gotten up a war—a most undesirable spectacle for an international guest.

There was a missionary on board, a thin, almost emaciated man, of the Presbyterian denomination. He was a most earnest person, and a great talker, naturally.

"Woe unto me," he would say, "if I preach not this gospel! And he preached it "in season and out of season."

Ellador was profoundly interested. I tried to explain to her that he was an enthusiast of a rather rigid type, and that she must not judge Christianity too harshly by him, but she quite re-assured me.

"Don't be afraid, my dear boy—I remember your outline of the various religions—all about how Christianity arose and spread; how it held together in one church for a long time, and then divided, and kept on dividing—naturally. And I remember about the religious wars, and persecutions, that you used to have in earlier ages. We had a good deal of trouble with religion in our first centuries too, and for a long time people kept appearing with some sort of new one they had had 'revealed' to them, just like yours. But we saw that all that was needed was a higher level of mentality and a clear understanding of the real Laws—so we worked toward that. And, as you know, we have been quite at peace as to our religion for some centuries. It's just part of us."

That was the clearest way of putting it she had yet thought of. The Herland religion was like the manners of a true aristocrat, a thing unborn and inbred. It was the way they lived. They had so clear and quick a connection between conviction and action that it was well nigh impossible for them to know a thing and not do it. I suppose that was why, when we had told them about the noble teachings of Christianity, they had been so charmed, taking it for granted that our behavior was equal to our belief.

The Reverend Alexander Murdock was more than pleased to talk with Ellador—any man would be, of course. He was immensely curious about her too, but even to impertinent questions she presented an amiable but absolute impermeability.

"From what country do you come, Mrs. Jennings;" he asked her one day, in my hearing. He did not know I was within earshot, however.

Ellador was never annoyed by questions, nor angry, nor confused. Where most people seem to think that there is no alternative but to answer correctly or to lie, she recognized an endless variety of things to say or not say. Sometimes she would look pleasantly at the inquirer, with those deep kind eyes of hers, and ask: "Why do you wish to know ?" Not sarcastically, not offensively at all, but as if she really wanted to know why they wanted to know. It was generally difficult for them to explain the cause of their curiosity, but if they did; if they said it was just interest, a kindly human interest in her, she would thank them for the interest, and ask if they felt it about every one. If they said they did, she would say, still with her quiet gentleness: "And is it customary, when one feels interested in a stranger, to ask them questions? I mean is it a —what you call a compliment? If so, I thank you heartily for the compliment."

If they drove her—some people never will take a hint—she would remain always quite courteous and gentle, even praise them for their perseverance, but never say one word she did not choose to. And she did not choose to give to anyone news of her beloved country until such time as that country decided it should be done.

The missionary was not difficult to handle.

"Did you not say that you were to preach the gospel to all nations—or all people—or something like that?" she asked him. "Do you find some nations easier to preach to than others? Or is it the same gospel to all?"

He assured her that it was the same, but that he was naturally interested in all his hearers, and that it was often important to know something of their antecedents. This she agreed might be an advantage, and left it at that, asking him if he would let her see his Bible. Once he was embarked on that subject, she had only to listen, and to steer the conversation, or rather the monologue.

I told her I had overheard this bit of conversation, begging her pardon for listening, but she said she would greatly enjoy having me with her while he talked. I told her I doubted if he would talk as freely if there were three of us, and she suggested in that case that if I was interested I was quite welcome to listen as far as she was concerned. Of course I wasn't going to be an eavesdropper, even on a missionary trying to convert my wife, but I heard a good bit of their talk as I strolled about, and sat with them sometimes.

He let her read his precious flexible Oxford Bible at times, giving her marked passages, and she read about a hundred times as much as he thought she could in a given time. It interested her immensely, and she questioned him eagerly about it:

"You call this 'The Word of God'?"

"Yes," he replied solemnly. "It is His Revealed Word."

"And every thing it says is true?"

"It is Truth itself, Divine Truth," he answered.

"You do not mean that God wrote it ?"

"Oh, no. He revealed it to His servants. It is an Inspired Book."

"It was written by many people, was it not?"

"Yes—many people, but the same Word."

"And at different times ?'

"Oh yes—the revelation was given at long intervals—the Old Testament to the Jews, the New Testament to us all."

Ellador turned the pages reverently. She had a great respect for religion, and for any sincere person.

"How old is the oldest part ?" she asked him.

He told her as best he could, but he was not versed in the latest scholarship and had a genuine horror of "the higher criticism." But I supplied a little information on the side, when we were alone, telling her of the patchwork group of ancient legends which made up the first part; of the very human councils of men who had finally decided which of the ancient writings were inspired and which were not; of how the Book of Job, the oldest of all, had only scraped in by one vote, and then, with rather a malicious relish, of that most colossal joke of all history—how the Song of Songs—that amorous, not to say salacious ancient love-lyric, had been embraced with the others and interpreted as a mystical lofty outburst of devotion with that "black but comely" light-o'-love figuring as The Church.

Ellador was quite shocked.

"But Van!—he ought to know that. You ought to tell him. Is it generally known?"

"It is known to scholars, not to the public as a whole."

"But they still have it bound in with the others—and think it is holy—when it isn't."

"Yes," I grinned, "the joke is still going on."

"What have the scholars done about it?" she asked.

"Oh, they have worked out their proof, shown up the thing—and let it go at that."

"Wasn't there any demand from the people who knew to have it taken out of the Bible?"

"There is one edition of the Bible now printed in all the separate books—a whole shelf full of little ones, instead of one big one."

"I should think that would be much better," she said, "but the other one is still printed—and sold?"

"Printed and sold and given away by hundreds of thousands—with The Joke going right on."

She was puzzled. It was not so much the real outside things we did which she found it hard to understand, but the different way our minds worked. In Herland, if a thing like that had been discovered, the first effort of all their wisest students would have been to establish the facts. When they were sure about it, they would then have taken the rather shameful old thing out of its proud position among the "sacred" books at once. They would have publicly acknowledged their mistake, rectified it, and gone on.

"You'll have to be very patient with me, Van dearest. It is going to take me a long time to get hold of your psychology. But I'll do my best."

Her best was something amazing. And she would have come to her final conclusions far earlier but for certain firm preconceptions that we were somehow better, nobler, than we were.

The Reverend Murdock kept at her pretty steadily. He started in at the beginning, giving her the full circumstantial account of The Temptation, The Fall, and The Curse.

She listened quietly, with no hint in her calm face of what she might be thinking. But when he came to the punishment of the serpent: "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life," she asked a question.

"Will you tell me please—how did the serpent 'go' before?"

Mr. Murdock looked at her. He was reading in a deep sorrowful voice, his mind full of the solemn purport of the Great Tragedy.

"What was his method of locomotion before he was cursed?" asked Ellador.

He laid down the book in some annoyance. "It is believed that the serpent walked erect, that he stood like a man, that he was Satan himself," he replied.

"But it says: "Now the serpent was more subtile than any of the beasts of the field," doesnt it? And the picture you showed me is of a snake, in the tree."

"The picture is, as it were, allegorical," he replied. "It is not reverent to question the divine account like this."

She did not mind this note of censure, but asked further: "As a matter of fact, do snakes eat dust?  Or is that allegorical too? How do you know which is allegorical and which is fact? Who decides?"

They had a rather stormy discussion on that point; at least the missionary was stormy. He was unable to reconcile Ellador's gentle courtesy with her singular lack of reverence for mere statements.

But our theological discussions were summarily ended, and Ellador reduced to clinging to her berth, by a severe storm. It was not a phenomenal hurricane by any means; but a steady lashing gale which drove us far out of our course, and so damaged the vessel that we could do little but drive before the wind.

"There's a steamer !" said Terry on the third day of heavy weather. And as we watched the drift of smoke on the horizon we found it was nearing us. And none too soon! By the time they were within hailing distance our small vessel ran up signals of distress, for we were leaking heavily, and we were thankful to be taken off, even though the steamer, a Swedish one, was bound for Europe instead of America.

They gave us better accommodations than we had had on the other, and eagerly took on board our big motor-boat and biplane—too eagerly, I thought.

Ellador was greatly interested in the larger ship, the big blond men, and in their talk. I prepared her as well as I could. They had good maps of Europe, and I filled in her outlines of history as far as I was able, and told her of the war. Her horror at this was natural enough.

"We have always had war," Terry explained. "Ever since the world began— at least as far as history goes, we have have had war. It is human nature."

"Human?" asked Ellador.

"Yes," he said, "human. Bad as it is, it is evidently human nature to do it. Nations advance, the race is improved by fighting. It is the law of nature."

Since our departure from Herland, Terry had rebounded like a rubber ball from all its influences. Even his love for Alima he was evidently striving to forget, with some success. As for the rest, he had never studied the country and its history as I had, nor accepted it like Jeff; and now he was treating it all as if it really was, what he had often called it to me, a bad dream. He would keep his word in regard to telling nothing about it; that virtue was his at any rate. But in his glad reaction, his delighted return, "a man in a world of men," he was now giving information to Ellador in his superior way, as if she was a totally ignorant stranger. And this war seemed almost to delight him.

"Yes," he repeated, "you will have to accept life as it is. To make war is human activity."

"Are some of the soldiers women?" she inquired.

"Women! Of course not! They are men; strong, brave men. Once in a while some abnormal woman becomes a soldier, I believe, and in Dahomey—that's in Africa—one of the black tribes have women soldiers. But speaking generally it is men—of course."

"Then why do you call it 'human' nature?" she persisted. "If it was human wouldn't they both do it?"

So he tried to explain that it was a human necessity, but it was done by the men because they could do it—and the women couldn't. "The women are just as indispensable —in their way. They give us the children—you know—men cannot do that."

To hear Terry talk you would think he had never left home.

Ellador listened to him with her grave gentle smile. She always seemed to understand not only what one said, but all the back-ground of sentiment and habit behind.

"Do you call bearing children 'human nature'?" she asked him.

"It's woman nature," he answered. "It's her work."

"Then why do you not call fighting 'man nature'—instead of human?"

Terry's conclusion of an argument with Ellador was the simple one of going somewhere else. So off he went, to enjoy himself in the society of those sturdy Scandinavians, and we two sat together discussing war.

 

 

Chapter 2 War

FOR a long time my wife from Wonderland, as I love to call her, used to the utmost the high self-restraint taught by her religion, her education, the whole habit of her life. She knew that I should be grieved by her distresses, that I expected the new experiences would be painful to her and was watching to give what aid and comfort I could; and further she credited me with, a racial sensitiveness and pride far beyond the facts.

Here again was one of the differences between her exquisitely organized people and ours. With them the majority of their interests in life were communal; their love and pride and ambition was almost wholly for the group, even motherhood itself was viewed as social service, and so fulfilled. They were all of them intimately acquainted with their whole history, that was part of their beautiful and easy educational system; with their whole country, and with all its industries.

The children of Herland were taken to all parts of the country, shown all its arts and crafts, taught to honor its achievements and to appreciate its needs and difficulties. They grew up with a deep and vital social consciousness which not one in a thousand of us could approach.

This kind of thing does not show; we could not see it externally, any more than one could see a good housewife's intimate acquaintance with and pride in the last detail of her menage. Further, as our comments on their country had been almost wholly complimentary (they had not heard Terry's!), we had not hurt this national pride; or if we had they had never let us see it.

Now here was Ellador, daring traveler, leaving her world for mine, and finding herself, not as we three had been, exiled into a wisely ordered, peaceful and beautiful place, with the mothering care of that group of enlightened women; but as one alone in a world of which her first glimpse was of hideous war. As one who had never in her life seen worse evil than misunderstanding, or accident, and not much of these; one to whom universal comfort and beauty was the race habit of a thousand years, the sight of Europe in its present condition was far more of a shock than even I had supposed.

She thought that I felt as she did. I did feel badly, and ashamed, but not a thousandth part as she would have felt the exposure of some fault in Herland; not nearly as badly as she supposed.

I was constantly learning from her to notice things among us which I had never seen before, and one of the most conspicuous of my new impressions was the realization of how slightly socialized we are. We are quite indifferent to public evils, for the most part, unless they touch us personally; which is as though the housewife was quite indifferent to having grease on the chairs unless she happened to spoil her own dress with it. Even our "reformers" seem more like such a housewife who should show great excitement over the greasy chairs, but none over the dusty floor, the grimy windows, the empty coal-bin, the bad butter, or the lack of soap. Special evils rouse us, some of us, but as for a clean, sanitary, effortless housekeeping—we have not come to want it—most of us.

But Ellador, lovely, considerate soul that she was, had not only the incessant shock of these new impressions to meet and bear, but was doing her noble best to spare my feelings by not showing hers. She could not bear to blame my sex, to blame my country, or at least my civilization, my world; she did not wish to-cast reproach on me.

I was ashamed, to a considerable degree. If a man has been living in the pleasant atmosphere of perfect housekeeping, such as I have mentioned, and is then precipitated suddenly into foul slovenliness, with noise, confusion and ill-will, he feels it more than if he had remained in such surroundings from the first.

It was the ill-will that counted most. Here again comes the psychic difference between the women of Herland and us. People who grow up amid slang, profanity, obscenity, harsh contradiction and quarrelling, do not particularly note or mind it. But one reared in an atmosphere of the most subtle understanding, gracious courtesy, and a loving use of language as an art, is very sharply impressed if someone says: "Hold yer jaw, yer son of a !," or even by a glowering roomful of silent haters.

That's what was heavy on Ellador all the time,—the atmosphere, the social atmosphere of suspicion, distrust, hatred, of ruthless self-aggrandizement and harsh scorn.

There was a German officer on this ship. He tried to talk to Ellador at first, merely because she was a woman and beautiful. She tried to talk to him, merely because he was a human being a member of a great nation.

But I, watching, saw how soon the clear light of her mind brought out the salient characteristics -of his, and of how, in spite of all her exalted philosophy, she turned shuddering away from him.

We were overhauled by an English vessel before reaching our destination in Sweden, and all three of us were glad to be transferred because we could so reach home sooner. At least that was what we thought. The German officer was not glad, I might add.

Ellador hailed the change with joy. She knew more about England than about the Scandinavian countries, and could speak the language. I think she thought it would be—easier there.

We were unable to get away as soon as we expected. Terry indeed determined to enlist, or to join the service in some way, and they were glad to use him and his aeroplane. This was not to be wondered at. If Terry had the defects of his qualities he also had the qualities of his defects, and he did good work for the Allies.

Ellador, rather unexpectedly asked to stay awhile: "It is hard," she said, "but we may not come again perhaps, and I want to learn all I can."

So we stayed and Ellador learned. It did not take her long. She was a rapid reader, and soon found the right books. She was a marvellous listener, and many were glad to talk to her, and to show her things.

We investigated in London, Manchester, Birmingham; were entertained in beautiful country places; went motoring up into Scotland and in Ireland; visited Wales, and then, to my great surprise, she urged that we go to France.

"I want to see, to know," she said. "To really know ."

I was worried about her. She had a hard-set fixity of expression. Her unfailing gentleness was too firm of surface, and she talked less and less with me about social conditions.

We went to France.

She visited hospitals, looking at those broken men, those mained and blinded boys, and grew paler and harder daily. Day by day she gathered in the new language, till soon she could talk with the people.

Then we ran across Terry, scouting about with his machine; and Ellador asked to be taken up—she wanted to see a battlefield. I tried to dissuade her from this, fearing for her. Even her splendid health seemed shaken by all she had witnessed. But she said: "It is my duty to see and know all I can. This is not, they tell me—exceptional? This—war ?"

"Not at all," said Terry. "It's only bigger than usual, as most things are now. Why, in all our history there have only been about three hundred years without war."

She looked at him, her eyes widening, darkening. "When was that?" she said. "After Jesus came?"

Terry laughed. "Oh no," he said. "It wasn't any one time. It's three hundred years here and there, scattering. So you see war is really the normal condition of human life."

"So," she said. "Then I ought to see it. Take me up, please."

He didn't want to; said it was dangerous; but it was very hard to say no to Ellador, and she had her way. She saw the battle lines of trenches. She saw the dead men; she saw and heard the men not dead, where there had been recent fighting. She saw the ruins, ruins everywhere.

That night she was like a woman of marble, cold, dumb, sitting still by the window where she could rest her eyes on the far stars. She treated me with a great poignant tenderness, as one would treat a beloved friend whose whole family had become lepers.

We went back to England, and she spent the last weeks of our stay there finding out all she could about Belgium.

That was the breaking point. She locked the door of her room, but I heard her sobbing her heart out—Ellador, who had never in all her splendid young life had an experience of pain, and whose consciousness was mainly social. We feel these horrors as happening to other people; she felt them as happening to herself.

I broke the lock—I had to get to her. She would not speak, would not look at me, but buried her face in the pillow, shuddering away from me as if I, too, were a German. The great sobs tore her. It was, I suddenly felt, not like the facile tears of an ordinary woman, but like the utter breakdown of a strong man. And she was as ashamed of it.

Then I had enough enlightenment to see some little relief for her, not from the weight of horrible new knowledge, but from the added burden of her selfrestraint.

I knelt beside her and got her into my arms, her head hidden on my shoulder. "Dear," said I,

"Dear—I can't help the horror, but at least I can help you bear it—and you can let me try. You see you're all alone here—I'm all you've got. You'll have to let it out somehow— just say it all to me."

She held me very close then, with a tense, frightened grip. "I want—I want—my Mother!" she sobbed.

Ellador's mother was one of those wise women who sat in the Temples, and gave comfort and counsel when needed. They loved each other more than I, not seeing them always together, had understood. Yet her mother had counseled her going, had urged it, for the sake of their laud and its future.

"Mother! Mother! Mother!" she sobbed under her breath. "Oh— Mother! Help me bear it!"

There was no Mother and no Temple, only one man who loved her, and in that she seemed to find a little ease, and slowly grew quieter.

"There is one thing we know more about than you do," I suggested. "That is how to manage pain. You mustn't keep it to yourself—you must let it out—let the others help bear it. That's good psychology, dear."

"It seems so—unkind," she murmured.

"Oh, no, it's not unkind; it's just necessary. 'Bear ye one another's burdens,' you know. Also we have a nice proverb about marriage. 'It makes joy double and halveth trouble.' Just pile it on me, dearest—that's what a husband is for."

"But how can I say to you the things I feel? It seems so rude, so to reflect on your people—your civilization."

"I think you underrate two things," I suggested. "One is that I'm a human creature, even if male; the other that my visit to Herland, my life with you, has had a deep effect on me. I see the awfulness of war as I never did before, and I can even see a little of how it must affect you. What I want you to do now is to relieve the pressure of feeling which is hurting so, by putting it into words—letting it out. Say it all. Say the very worst. Say—'This world is not civilized, not human. It is worse than the humble savagery below our mountains.' Let out, dear—I can stand it. And you'll feel better."

She lifted her head and drew a long, shuddering breath.

"I think you are right—there must be some relief. And here are You!" Suddenly she threw her arms around me and held me close, close.

"You do love me—I can feel it! A little—a very little—like mother love! I am so grateful!"

She rested in my arms, till the fierce tempest of pain had passed somewhat, and then we sat down, close together, and she followed my advice, seeking to visualize, to put in words, to fully express, the anguish which was upon her.

"You see," she began slowly, "it is hard for me to do this because I hate to hurt you. You must care so—so horribly."

"Stop right there, dear," I told her. "You overestimate my sensitiveness. What I feel is nothing at all to what you feel—I can see that. Remember that in our race-traditions war is a fine thing, a splendid thing. We have idealized war and the warrior, through all our history. You have read a good deal of our history by now."

She had, I knew, and she nodded her head sadly. "Yes, it's practically all about war," she agreed. "But I didn't —I couldn't visualize it."

She closed her eyes and shrank back, but I went on steadily: "So you see this is not—to us—wholly a horror; it is just more horrible than other wars on account of the infamous behavior of some combatants, and because we really are beginning to be civilized. Now this pain that you see is no greater than the same pain all the way back in history—always. And you are not being miserable about that, surely?"

No, she admitted, she wasn't.

"Very well," I hurried on, "we, the human race, outside of Herland, have been fighting one another for all the ages, and we are here yet; some of these military enthusiasts say because of war —some of the pacifists say in spite of it, and I'm beginning to agree with them. With you, Ellador, through you, and because of you, and because of seeing what human life can be, in your blessed country, I see things as I never did before. I'm growing."

She smiled a little at that, and took my hand again.

"You are the most important ambassador that ever was," I continued. "You are sent from your upland island, your little hidden heaven, to see our poor blind bleeding world and carry news of it to your people. Perhaps that vast storehouse of mother-love can help to set us straight at last. And you can't afford to feel our sorrow—you'd die of it. You must think—and talk it off, remorselessly, to me."

"You Amazing Darling!" she answered at last, drawing a deep breath. "You are right—wholly right. I'm afraid I have—a little—underrated your wisdom. Forgive me!"

I forgave her fast enough, though I knew it was an impossible offence, and she began to free her mind.

"First as to Christianity," she said. "That gave me great hopes—at first. Not the mythology of course, but the spirit; and when that missionary man enlarged on the spread of Christianity and its countless benefits I began to feel that here was a lovely thing it would do us good to know about— something very close to Motherhood."

"Motherhood," always revently spoken, was the highest, holiest word they knew in Herland.

"But as I've read and talked and studied all these weeks, I do not find that Christianity has done one thing to stop war, or that Christian countries fight any less than heathen ones—rather more. Also they fight amoung themselves. Christianity has not brought peace on earth—not at all."

"No," I admitted, "it hasn't, but it tries to—ameliorate, to heal and save."

"That seems to me simply—foolish," she answered. "If there is a house on fire, the only true way to check the destruction is to put the fire out. To sit about trying to heal burned skin and repair burned furniture is—foolish."

"Especially when the repaired furniture serves as additional fuel for more fire," I added.

"You see it !" she exclaimed joyfully. "Then why don't you—but, I see—you are only one. You alone cannot change it."

"Oh no, I'm not alone in that," I answered cheerfully. "There are plenty more who see it."

"Then why—" she began, but checked herself, and paused a little, continuing slowly. "What I wish to get off my mind is this spectacle of measureless suffering which human beings are deliberately inflicting on one another. It would be hard enough to bear if the pain was unavoidable—that would be pure horror, and the eager rush to help. But here there is not only horror but a furious scorn—because they do not have to have it at all."

"You're qute right, my dear," I agreed. "But how are you going to make them stop?"

"That's what I have to find out," she answered gravely. "I wish Mother was here—and all the Over-Mothers. They would find a way. There must be a way. And you are right—I must not let myself be overcome by this—"

"Put it this way," I suggested. "Even if three quarters of the world should be killed there would be plenty left to refill, as promptly as would be wise. You remember how quickly your country filled up?"

"Yes," she said. "And I must remember that it is the race-progress that counts, not just being alive."

Then, wringing her hands in sudden bitterness, she added: "But this stops all progress! It is not merely that people are being killed. Half the world might die in an earthquake and not do this harm! It is the Hating I mind more than the killing—the perversion of human faculty. It's not humanity dying—it is humanity going mad!"

She was shivering again, that black horror growing in her eyes.

"Gently dear, gently," I told her. Humanity is a large proposition. You and I have a whole round world to visit—as soon as it is safe to travel. And in the meantime I want to get you to my country as soon as possible. We are not at war. Our people are goodnatured and friendly. I think you'll like us."

It was not unnatural for an American, in war-mad Europe, to think of his own land with warm approval, nor for a husband to want his wife to appreciate his people and his country.

"You must tell me more about it," she said eagerly. "I must read more too—study more. I do not do justice to the difference, I am sure. I am judging the world only by Europe. And see here, my darling—do you mind if we see the rest first? I want to know The World as far as I can, and as quickly as I can. I'm sure that if I study first for awhile, in England—they seem so familar with all the world—that we might then go east instead of west, and see the rest of it before we reach America— leave the best to the last."

Except for the danger of traveling there seemed no great objection to this plan. I would rather have her make her brief tour and then return with me to my own dear country at the end, than to have her uneasy there and planning to push on.

We went back to a quiet place in England, where we could temporarily close our minds to the Horror, and Ellador, with unerring judgment, found an encyclopedic young historian with the teaching gift, and engaged his services for a time.

They had a series of maps—from old blank "terra incognita" ones, with its bounding ocean of ancient times, to the spread of accurate surveying which now gives us the whole surface of the earth. She kissed the place where her little homeland lay hidden—but that was when he was not looking.

The rapid grasp she made at the whole framework of our history would have astonished anyone not acquainted with Herland brains and Herland methods of education. It did astonish the young historian. She by no means set herself to learn all that he wanted to teach her; on the contrary she continually checked his flow of information, receiving only what she wanted to know.

A very few good books on world evolution—geological, botanical, zoological, and ethnic, gave her the background she needed, and such a marvel of condensation as Winwood Reade's Martydom of Man supplied the outline of history.

Her own clear strong uncrowded and logical mind, with its child-fresh memory, saw, held and related the facts she learned, with no apparent effort. Presently she had a distinct view of what we people have been up to on earth for the few ages of our occupancy. She had her estimate of time taken and of the rate of our increased speed. I had never realized how long, how immeasurably long and slow, were the years "before progress," so to speak, or the value of each great push of new invention. But she got them all clearly in place, and, rigidly refusing to be again agonized by the ceaseless wars, she found eager joy in counting the upward steps of social evolution.

This joy increased as the ages came nearer to our own. She became fascinated with the record of inventions and discoveries and their interrelative effects. Each great religion as it entered, was noted, defined in its special power and weakness, and its consequences observed. She made certain map effects for herself, "washing in" the different areas with various colors, according to the different religions, and lapping them over where they had historically lapped, as for instance, where the "mafiana" of the Spaniard marks the influence following Oriental invasion, and where Buddhism produces such and such effects according to its reception by Hindu, Chinese, or Japanese.

"I could spend a lifetime in these details," she eagerly explained again, "but I'm only after enough to begin on. I must get them placed—so that I can understand what each nation is for, what they have done for one another, and for the world; which of them are going on, and how fast; which of them are stopping—or sinking back—and why. It is profoundly interesting."

Ellador's attitude vaguely nettled me, just a little, in that earlier consciousness I was really outgrowing so fast. She seemed like an enthusiastic young angel "slumming." I resented—a little—this cheerful and relentless classification—just as poor persons resent being treated as "cases."

But I knew she was right after all, and was more than delighted to have her so soon triumph over the terrible influence of the war. She did not, of course, wholly escape or forget it. Who could? But she successfully occupied her mind with other matters.

"It's so funny," she said to me. "Here in all your history books, the whole burden of information is as to who fought who—and when; and who 'reigned' and when—especially when. Why are your historians so morbidly anxious about the exact dat^?"

"Why it's important, isn't it?" I asked.

"From certain points of view, yes; but not in the least from that of the general student. The doctor wants to know at just what hour the fever rises, or declines; he has to have his 'chart' to study. But the public ought to know how fever is induced and how it is to be avoided. People in general ought to know the whole history of the of the world in general; and what were the most important things that happened. And here the poor things are required to note and remember that this king "came to the throne" at such a date and died at such another—facts of no historic importance whatever. And as to the wars and wars and wars '—and all these 'decisive battles of history'—" Ellador had the whole story so clearly envisaged now that she could speak of war without cringing—"why that isn't history at all !"

"Surely it's part of history, isn't it?" I urged.

"Not even part of it. Go back to your doctor's 'chart'—his 'history of the case.' That history treats of the inception, development, success or failure of the disease he is treating. To say that 'At four-fifteen p. m. the patient climbed into another patient's bed and bit him,' is no part of that record of tuberculosis or cancer."

"It would be if it proved him delirious, wouldn't it?" I suggested.

Ellador lifted her head from the chart she was filling in, and smiled enchantingly. "Van," she said, "I'm proud of you. That's splendid!

"It would then appear," she pursued, glancing over her papers, "as if the patent had a sort of intermittent fever— from the beginning; hot fits of rage and fury, when he is practically a lunatic, and cold fits, too," she cried eagerly, pursuing the illustration, "cold and weak, when he just lies helpless and cannot do anything."

We agreed that as a figure of speech this was pretty strong and clear, with its inevitable suggestion that we must study the origin of the disease, how to cure, and still better, prevent it.

"But there is a splendid record behind all that," she told me. I can't see that your historians have ever seen it clearly and consecutively. You evidently have not come to the place where all history has to be consciously revised for educational purposes."

"Ours is more complex than yours, isn't it?" I offered. "So many different nations and races, you know ?"

But she smiled wisely and shook her head, quoting after her instructor: "And history, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.'

"They all tell about the same things," she said. "They all do the same things, and not one of them ever sees what really matters most—ever gives 'the history of the case' correctly. I truly think, dear, that we could help you with your history."

She had fully accepted the proposition I made that day when the Horror so overthrew her, and now talked to me as freely as if I were one of her sisters. She talked about men as if I wasn't one, and about the world as if it was no more mine than hers.

There was a strange exaltation, a wonderful companionship, in this. I grew to see life as she saw it, more and more, and it wasJike rising from some tangled thorny thicket to take a bird's eye view of city and farmland, of continent and ocean. Life itself grew infinitely more interesting. I thought of that benighted drummer's joke, that "Life is just one damn thing after another," so widely accepted as voicing a general opinion. I thought of our pathetic virtues of courage, cheerfulness, patience—all so ridiculously wasted in facing troubles which need not be there at all.

Ellador saw human life as a thing in the making, with human beings as the makers. We have always seemed to regard it as an affliction—or blessing— bestowed upon us by some exterior force. Studying, seeing, understanding, with her, I grew insensibly to adopt her point of view, her scale of measurements, and her eager and limitless interest. So when we did set forth on on our round-the-world trip to my home, we were both fairly well equipped for the rapid survey which was all we planned for.

Chapter 3 A Journey of Inspection

IT WAS fortunate for Ellador's large purposes that her fat little bag of jewels contained more wealth than I had at first understood, and that there were some jewel-hungry millionaires left in the world. In India we found native princes who were as much athirst for rubies and emeralds as ever were their hoarding ancestors, and who had comfortable piles of ancient gold wherewith to pay for them. We were easily able to fill snug belts with universally acceptable gold pieces, and to establish credit to carry us wherever there were banks.

She was continually puzzled over our money values. "Why do they want these so much?" she demanded. "Why are they willing to pay so much for them?"

Money she understood well enough. They had their circulating medium in Herland in earlier years; but it was used more as a simple method of keeping accounts than anything else—like tickets, and finally discontinued. They had so soon centralized their industries, that the delay and inconvenience of measuring off every item of exchange in this everlasting system of tokens became useless, to their practical minds. As an "incentiveto industry" it was not necessary; motherhood was their incentive. When they had plenty of everything it was free to all in such amounts as were desired; in scarcity they divided. Their interest in life was in what they were doing—and what they were going to do, not in what they were to get. Our point of view puzzled her.

I remember this matter coming up between Ellador and a solemn college professor, an economist, as we were creeping through the dangerous Mediterranean. She questioned and listened, saying nothing about her country—this we had long since found was the only safe way; for the instant demand: "Where is it ?" was what we did not propose to answer.

But having learned what she could from those she talked with, and sped searchingly through the books they offered her, she used to relieve her mind in two ways; by talking with me, and by writing.

"I've simply got to," she told me. "I'm writing a book—:in fact, I'm writing two books. One is notes, quotations, facts, and pictures—pictures—pictures. This photography is a wonderful art !"

She had become quite a devotee of said art, and was gathering material right and left, to show her people.

"We'll have to go back and tell them, you know," she explained, "and they'll be so interested, I shall have to go about lecturing, as you men did." "

I wish you'd go about lecturing to us," I told her. "We have more to learn than you have—of the really important matters in living."

"But I couldn't, you see, without quoting always from home—and then they'd want to know—they'd have a right to know. Or else they wouldn't believe me. No, all I can do is to ask questions; to make suggestions, perhaps, here and there; even to criticise a little—when I've learned a lot more, and if I'm very sure of my hearers. Meanwhile I've got to talk it off to you, you poor boy—and just write. You shall read it, if you want to, of course."

Her notes were a study in themselves.

Ships and shipping interested her at once, as something totally new, and her first access to encyclopedias had supplied background to what she learned from people. She had set down, in the briefest possible manner, not mere loose data as to vessels and navigation, but an outlined history of the matter, arranged like a genealogical tree.

There were the rude beginnings—log, raft, skin-boat, basket-boat, canoe; and the line of paddled or oared boats went on to the great carved war-canoes with outriggers, the galleys of Romans and Norsemen, the delicate birchbarks of our American Aborigines, and the neat manufactured ones on the market. A bare sentence covered it, and another the evolution of the sailing craft; then steam.

"Navigation is an exclusively masculine process," she noted. "Always men, only men. Oared vessels of large size required slave labor; status of sailors still akin to slavery; rigid discipline, miserable accommodations, abusive language and personal violence." To this she added in parenthesis: "Same holds true of armies. Always men, only men. Similar status, but somewhat better provision for men, and more chance of promotion, owing to greater danger to officers."

Continuing with ships, she noted: "Psychology: a high degree of comradeship, the habit of obedience—enforced; this doubtless accounts for large bodies of such indispensable men putting up with such wretched treatment. Obedience appears to dull and weaken the mind; same with soldiers—study further. Among officers great personal gallantry, a most exalted sense of duty, as well as brutal and unjust treatment of inferiors. The captain in especial is so devoted to his concept of duty as sometimes to prefer to 'go down with his ship' to being saved without her. Why ? What social service is there in being drowned? I learn this high devotion is found also in engineers and in pilots. Seems to be a product of extreme responsibility. Might be developed more widely by extending opportunity."

She came to me with this, asking for more information on our political system of "rotation in office."

"Is that why you do it?" she asked eagerly. "Not so much as to get the work done better, as to make all the people—or at least most of them—feel greater responsibility, a deeper sense of duty?"

I had never put it that way to myself, but I now agreed that that was the idea —that it must be. She was warmly interested ; said she knew she should love America. I felt sure she would.

There was an able Egyptologist on board, a man well acquainted with ancient peoples, and he, with the outline she had so well laid down during her English studies, soon filled her mind with a particularly clear and full acquaintance with our first civilizations.

"Egypt, with its One River; Asia Minor, with the Valley of the Two Rivers and China with its great rivers—" she poured over her maps and asked careful eager questions. The big black bearded professor was delighted with her interest, and discoursed most instructively.

"I see," she said. "I see! They came to places where the soil was rich, and where there was plenty of water. It made agriculture possible, profitable— and then the surplus—and then the wonderful growth—of course!"

That German officer, who had made so strong and disagreeable an impression while we were on the Swedish ship, had been insistent, rudely insistent, on the advantages of difficulty and what he called "disclipine." He had maintained that the great races, the dominant races, came always from the north. This she had borne in mind, and now questioned her obliging preceptor, with map outspread and dates at hand.

"For all those thousands of years these Mediterranean and Oriental peoples held the world—were the world?"

"Yes, absolutely."

"And what was up here?" she pointed to the wide vacant spaces on the northern coasts.

"Savages — barbarians — wild, skinclad ferocious men, madam."

Ellador made a little diagram, a vertical line, with many ages marked across it.

"This is The Year One—as far back as you can go," she explained, pointing to the mark at the bottom. "And here we are, near the top—this is Now. And these Eastern peoples held the stage and did the work all the way up to—here, did they?"

"They certainly did, madam."

"And were these people in these northern lands there all the time? Or did they happen afterward?"

"They were there—we have their bones to prove it."

"Then if they were there—and as long, and of the same stock—you tell me that all these various clans streamed out, westward, from a common source, and became in time, Persians, Hindus, Pelasgians, Etruscans, and all the rest—as well as "Celts, Slavs, Teutons?"

"It so held, roughly speaking." He resented a little her sweeping generalizations and condensations; but she had her own ends in view.

"And what did these northern tribes contribute to social progress during all this time?"

"Practically nothing," he answered. "Their arts were naturally limited by the rigors of the climate. The difficulties of maintaining existence prevented any higher developments."

"I see, I see." she nodded gravely. "Then why is it, in the face of these facts, that some still persist in attributing progress to difficulties, and cold weather."

This professor, who was himself Italian, was quite willing to question this opinion.

"That theory you will find is quite generally confined to the people who live in the colder climates," he suggested.

When Ellador discussed this with me, she went further. "It seems as if, when people say—'The World' they mean their own people," she commented. "I've been reading history as written by the North European races. Perhaps when we get to Persia, India, China and Japan, it will be different."

It was different. I had spent my own youth in the most isolated of modern nations, the one most ignorant of and indifferent to all the others; the one whose popular view of foreigners is based on the immigrant classes, and whose travelling rich consider Europe as a play-ground, a picture gallery, a museum, a place wherein to finish one's education. Being so reared, and associating with similarly minded persons, my early view of history was a great helter-skelter surging background to the clear, strong, glorious incidents of our own brief national career; while geography consisted of the vivid large scale familiar United States, and a globe otherwise covered with more or less nebulous maps; and such political evolution as I had in mind consisted of the irresistible development of our own "instiutions."

All this, of course, was my youthful attitude. In later studies I had added a considerable knowledge of general history, sociology and the like, but had never realized until now how remote all this was to me from the definite social values already solidly established in my mind.

Now, associating with Ellador, dispassionate and impartial as a visiting angel, bringing to her studies of the world, the triple freshness of view of one of different stock, different social development, and different sex, I began to get a new perspective. To her the world was one field of general advance. Her own country held the foreground in her mind, of course, but she had left it as definitely as if she came from Mars, and was studying the rest of humanity in the mass. Her alien point of view, her previous complete ignorance, and that powerful well-ordered mind she brought to bear on the new knowledge so rapidly amassed, gave her advantages as an observer far beyond our best scientists.

The one special and predominant distinction given to her studies by her supreme femininity, was what gave me the most numerous, and I may say, unpleasant surprises. In my world studies I had always assumed that humanity did thus and so, but she was continually sheering through the tangled facts with her sharp distinction that this and this phenomenon was due to masculinity alone.

"But Ellador," I protested, "why do you say—'the male Scandinavians continually indulged in piracy,' and 'the male Spaniards practiced terrible cruelties,' and so on? It sounds so—invidious—as if you were trying to make out a case against men."

"Why, I wouldn't do that for anything!" she protested. "I'm only trying to understand the facts. You don't mind when I say 'the male Phoenicians made great progress in navigation,' or 'the male Greeks developed great intelligence,' do you?"

"That's different," I answered. "They did do those things."

"Didn't they do the others, too?"

"Well—yes—they did them, of course; but why rub it in that they were exclusively males?"

"But weren't they, dear? Really? Did the Norse women raid the coasts of England and France? Did the Spanish women cross the ocean and torture the poor Aztecs?"

"They would have if they could !" I protested.

"So would the Phoenician women and Grecian women in the other cases— wouldn't they?"

I hesitated.

"Now my Best Beloved," she said, holding my hand in both hers and looking deep into my eyes—"Please, oh please, don't mind. The facts are there, and they are immensely important. Think, dearest. We of Herland have known no men—till now. We, alone, in our tiny land, have worked out a happy, healthy life. Then you came—you' 'Wonderful Three.' Ah! You should realize the stir, the excitement, the Great Hope that it meant to us! We knew there was more world—but nothing about it, and you meant a vast new life to us. Now I come to see—to learn—for the sake of my country.

"Because, you see, some things we gathered from you made us a little afraid. Afraid for our children, you see. Perhaps it was better, after all, to live up there, alone, in ignorance, but in happiness, we thought. Now I've come—to see—to learn—to really understand, if I can, so as to tell my people.

"You mustn't think I'm against men, dear. Why, if it were only for your sake, I would love them. And I'm sure—we are all sure at home (or at least most of us are) that two sexes, working together, must be better than one.

"Then I can see how, being two sexes, and having so much more complex a problem than ours, and having all kinds of countries to live in—how you got into difficulties we never knew.

"I'm making every allowance. I'm firm in my conviction of the superiority of the bisexual method. It must be best or it would not have been evolved in all the higher animals. But—but you can't expect me to ignore facts."

No, I couldn't. What troubled me most was that I, too, began to see facts, quite obvious facts, which I had never noticed before.

Wherever men had been superior to women we had proudly claimed it as a sex-distinction. Wherever men had shown evil traits, not common to women, we had serenely treated them as racecharacteristics.

So, although I did not enjoy it, I did not dispute any further Ellador's growing collection of facts. It was just as well not to. Facts are stubborn things.

We visited a little in Tunis, Algiers, and Cairo, making quite an excursion in Egypt, with our steamship acquaintance, whose knowledge was invaluable to us. He translated inscriptions; showed us the more important discoveries, and gave condensed accounts of the vanished civilizations.

Ellador was deeply impressed.

"To think that under one single city, here in Abydos, there are the remains of five separate cultures. Five! As different as can be. With a long time between, evidently, so that the ruins were forgotten, and a new people built a new city on the site of the old one. It is wonderful."

Then she turned suddenly on Signor Armini. "What did they die of?" she demanded.

"Die of? Who, madam?"

"Those cities—those civilizations?"

"Why, they were conquered in war, doubtless; the inhabitants were put to the sword—some carried away as slaves, perhaps—and the cities razed to the ground ?"

"By whom?" she demanded. "Who did it?"

"Why, other peoples, other cultures, from other cities ?'

"Do you mean other peoples, or just other men ?" she asked.

He was puzzled. "Why, the soldiers were men, of course, but war was made by one nation against another."

"Do you mean that the women of the other nations were the governing power and sent the men to fight ?"

No, he did not mean that.

"And surely the children did not send them?"

Of course not.

"But people are men, women and children, aren't they? And only the adult men, about one-fifth of the population, made war?"

This he admitted perforce, and Ellador did not press the point further.

"But in these cities were all kinds of people, wern't there? Women and children, as well as men ?"

This was obvious, also; and then she branched off a little: "What made them want to conquer a city?"

"Either fear—or revenge—or desire for plunder. Oftenest that. The ancient cities were the centers of production, of course." And he discoursed on the beautiful handicrafts of the past, the rich fabrics, the jewels and carved work and varied treasures.

"Who made them," she asked.

"Slaves, for the most part," he answered.

"Men and women ?"

"Yes—men and women."

"I see," said Ellador. She saw more than she spoke of, even to me. In ancient Egypt she found much that pleased her in the power and place of historic womanhood. This satisfaction was shortlived as we went on eastward.

With a few books, with eager questioning of such experts as we met, and what seemed to me an almost supernatural skill in eliciting valuable and apposite information from unexpected quarters, my lady from Herland continued to fill her mind and her note-books.

To me, who grew more and more to admire her, to reverence her, to tenderly love her, as we traveled on together, there now appeared a change in her spirit, more alarming even than that produced by Europe's war. It was like the difference between the terror roused in one surrounded by lions, and the loathing experienced in the presence of hideous reptiles, this not in the least at the people, but at certain lamentable social conditions.

In visiting our world she had been most unfortunately first met by the hot horrors of war; and I had thought to calm her by the static nations, the older peoples, sitting still among their ruins, richly draped in ancient and interesting histories. But a very different effect was produced. What she had read, while it prepared her to understand the sequence of affairs, had in no case given what she recognized as the really important events and their results.

"I'm writing a little history of the world," she told me, with a restrained smile. "Just a little one, so that I can have something definite to show them."

"But how can you, dearest—in this time, with what da'ta you have ? I know you are wonderful—but a history of the world!"

"Only a little one," she answered. "Just a synopsis. You know we are used to condensing and simplifying for our children. I suppose that is where we get the 'grasp of salient features' you have spoken of so often. These historians I read now certainly do not have it."

She continued tender to me, more so if anything. Of two things we talked with pleasure: of Herland and my land, and always of the beauty of nature. This seemed to her a ceaseless source of strength and comfort.

"It's the same world," she said, as we leaned side by side on the rail at the stern, and watched the white wake run uncoiling away from us, all silver-shining under the round moon. "The same sky, the same stars, some of them, the same blessed sun and moon. And the dear grass—and the trees—the precious trees."

Being by profession a forester, it was inevitable that she should notice trees; and in Europe she found much to admire, though lamenting the scarcity of foodbearing varieties. In Northern Africa she had noted the value of the palm, the olive, and others, and had readily understood the whole system of irrigation and its enormous benefits. What she did not easily grasp was its disuse, and the immeasurable futility of the fellaheen, still using the shadoof after all these ages of progress.

"I dont' see yet," she admitted, "what makes their minds so—so impervious. It can't be because they're men, surely. Men are not duller than women, are they, dear?"

"Indeed they are not!" I cried, rather stung by this new suggestion. "Men are the progressive sex, the thinkers, the innovators. It is the women who are conservative and slow. Even you will have to admit that."

"I certainly will if I find it so," she answered cheerfully. "I can see that these women are dull enough. But then —if they do things differently there are penalties, aren't there ?"

"Penalties?"

"Why, yes. If the women innovate and rebel the least that happens to them is that the men won't marry them—isn't that so?"

"I shouldn't think vou would call that a penalty, my dear," I answered.

"Oh, yes, it is; it means extinction— the end of that variety of woman. You seem to have quite successfully checked mutation in women; and they had neither education, opportunity, or encouragement in other variation."

"Don't say 'you,'" I urged. "These are the women of the Orient you are talking about, not of all the world. Everybody knows that their position is pitiful and a great check to progress. Wait till you see my country!"

"I shall be glad to get there, dearest, I'm sure of that," she told me. "But as to these more progressive men among the Egyptians—there was no penalty for improving on the shadoof, was there? Or the method of threshing grain by the feet of cattle ?"

Then I explained, trying to show no irritation, that there was a difference in the progressiveness of nations, of various races; but that other things being equal, the men were as a rule more progressive than the women."

"Where are the other things equal, Van?"

I had to laugh at that; she was a very difficult person to argue with; but I told her they were pretty near equal in our United States, and that we thought our women fully as good as men, and a little tetter. She was comforted for a while, but as we went on into Asia, her spirit sank and darkened, and that change I spoke of became apparent.

Burmah was something of a comfort, and that surviving matriarchate in the island hills. But in our rather extended visit to India, guided and informed by both English and native friends, and supplied with further literature, she began to suffer deeply.

We had the rare good fortune to be allowed to accompany a scientific expedition up through the wonder of the Himalayas, through Thibet, and into China. Here that high sweet spirit drooped and shrunk, with a growing horror, a loathing, such as I had never seen before in her clear eyes. She was shocked beyond words at the vast area of dead country; skeleton country, deforested, deshrubbed, degrassed, wasted to the bone, lying there to burn in the sun and drown in the rain, feeding no one.

"Van, Van," she said. "Help me to forget the women a little and talk about the land! Help me to understand the— the holes in the minds of people. Here is intelligence, intellect, a high cultural development—of sorts. They have beautiful art in some lines. They have an extensive literature. They are old, very old, surely old enough to have learned more than any other people. And yet here is proof that they have never mastered the simple and obvious facts of how to take care of the land on which they live."

"But they still live on it, don't they ?"

"Yes—they live on it. But they live on it like swarming fleas on an emaciated kitten, rather than careful farmers on a well-cultivated ground. However," she brightened a little, "there's one thing; this horrible instance of a misused devastated land must have been of one great service. It must have served as an object lesson to all the rest of the world. Where such an old and wise nation has made so dreadful a mistake—for so long, at least no other nation need to make it."

I did not answer as fully and cheerfully as she wished, and she pressed me further.

"The world has learned how to save its trees—its soil—its beauty—its fertility, hasn't it? Of course, what I've seen is not all—it's better in other places ?"

"We did not go to Germany, you know, my dear. They have a high degree of skill in forestry there. In many countries it is now highly thought of. We are taking steps to preserve our own forests, though, so far, they are so extensive that we rather forgot there was any end of them."

"It will be good to get there, Van," and she squeezed my hand hard. "I must see it all. I must 'know the worst'—and surely I am getting the worst first! But you have free education—you have every advantage of climate—you have a mixture of the best blood on earth, of the best traditions. And you are brave and free and willing to learn. Oh, Van! I am so glad it was America that found us!"

I held her close and kissed her. I was glad, too. And I was proud clear through to have her speak so of us. Yet, still—I was not as perfectly comfortable about it as I had been at first.

She had read about the foot-binding process still common in so large a part of China, but somehow had supposed it was a thing of the past, and never general. Also, I fancy she had deliberately kept it out of her mind, as something impossible to imagine. Now she saw it. For days and days, as we traveled through the less known parts of the great country, she saw the crippled women; not merely those serenely installed in rich gardens and lovely rooms, with big-footed slaves to do their bidding; or borne in swaying litters by strong Coolies; but poor women, working women, toiling in the field, carrying their little mats to kneel on while they worked, because their feet were helpless aching pegs.

Presently, while we waited in a village, and were entertained by a local magnate who had business relations with one of our guides, Ellador was in the women's apartment, and she heard it—the agony of the bound feet of a child. The child was promptly hushed, struck and chided; made to keep quiet, but Ellador had heard its moaning. From a woman missionary she got details of the process, and was shown the poor little shrunken stumps.

That night she would not let me touch her, come near her. She lay silent, staring with set eyes, long shudders running over her from time to time.

When it came to speech, which was some days later, she could still but faintly express it.

"To think," she said slowly, "that there are on earth men who can do a thing like that to women—to little helpless children!"

"But their men don't do it, dearest," I urged. "It is the women, their own mothers, who bind the feet of the little ones. They are afraid to have them grow up 'big-footed women ? "

"Afraid of what?" asked Ellador, that shudder passing over her again.

Chapter 4 Nearing Home

WE stayed some little time in China, meeting most interesting and valuable people, missionaries, teachers, diplomats, merchants, some of them the educated English-speaking Chinese.

Ellador's insatiable interest, her exquisite courtesy and talent as a listener, made anyone willing to talk to her. She learned fast, and placed in that wide sunlit mind of hers each fact in due relation.

"I'm beginning to understand," she told me sweetly, "that I mustn't judge this—miscellaneous—world of yours as I do my country. We were just ourselves—an isolated homogeneous people. When we moved, we all moved together. You are all kinds of people, in all kinds of places, touching at the edges and getting mixed. And so far from moving on together, there are no two nations exactly abreast—that I can see; and they mostly are ages apart; some away ahead of the others, some going far faster than others, some stationary."

"Yes," I told her, "and in the still numerous savages we find the beginners, and the back-sliders—the hopeless back-sliders, in human progress."

"I see—I see—" she said reflectively. "When you say 'the civilized world' that is just a figure of speech. The world is not civilized yet—only spots in it, and those not wholly."

"That's about it," I agreed with her. "Of course, the civilized nations think of themselves as the world—that's natural."

"How does it compare—in numbers?" she inquired. "Let's look!"

So we consulted the statistics on the population of the earth, chasing through pages of classification difficult to sift, until we hit upon a little table: "Population of the earth according to race." "That ought to do, roughly speaking," I told her. "We'll call the white races civilized—and lump the others. Let's see how it comes out."

It came out that the total of IndoGermanic, or Aryan—White, for Europe, America, Persia, India and Australia, was 775,000,000; and the rest of the world, black, red, brown and yellow, was 788,000,000.

"Do you mean that the majority of mankind is still uncivilized?" she asked.

She didn't ask it unpleasantly. Ellador was never sarcastic or bitter. But the world was her oyster—to study, and she was quite impartial.

I, however, felt reproached by this cool estimate. "No indeed," I said, "you can't call China uncivilized—it is one of the very oldest civilizations we have. This is only by race you see, by color."

"Oh, yes," she agreed, "and race or color do not count in civilization? Of course not—how stupid I was!"

But I laid down the pencil I was using to total up populations, and looked at her with a new and grave misgiving. She was so world-innocent. Even the history she had so swiftly absorbed had not changed her, any more than indecent novels affect a child; the child does not know the meaning of the words.

In the light of Ellador's colossal innocence of what we are accustomed to call "life," I began to see that process in a wholly new perspective. Her country was but one; her civilization was one and indivisible; in her country the women and children lived as mothers, daughters, sisters, in general tolerance, love, education and service. Out of that nursery, school, garden, shop, and parlor, she came into this great scrambling world of ours, to find it spotted over with dissimilar peoples, more separated by their varying psychology than by geography, politics, or race; often ignorant of one another, often fearing, despising, hating one another; and each national group, each racial stock, assuming itself to be "the norm" by which to measure others. She had first to recognize the facts and then to disentangle the causes, the long lines of historic evolution which had led to these results. Even then it was hard for her really to grasp the gulfs divide one part of the human race from the others.

And now I had the unpleasant task of disabusing her of this last glad assumption, that race and color made no difference.

"Dear," I said slowly, "you must prepare your mind for another shock— though you must have got some of it already, here and there. Race and color make all the difference in the world. People dislike and despise one another on exactly that ground—difference in race and color. These millions who are here marked 'Aryan or White' include Persians and Hindus, yet the other white races are averse to intermarrying with these, whose skins are indeed much darker than ours, though they come of the same stock."

"Is the aversion mutual?" she asked, as calmly as if we had been discussing insects.

I assured her that, speaking generally, it was; that the flatter-faced Mongolians regarded us as hawklike in our aquiline features; and that little African children fled screaming from the unnatural horror of a first-seen white face.

But what I was thinking about was how I should explain to her the race prejudice in my own country, when she reached it. I felt like a housekeeper bringing home company, discovering that the company has far higher and more exacting standards than herself, and longing to get home first and set the house in order before inspection.

We spent some little time in Japan, Ellador enjoying the fairy beauty of the country, with its flower-worshipping, sunny-faced people, and the plump happy children everywhere.

But instead of being content with the artistic beauty of the place; with that fine lacquer of smiling courtesy with which their life is covered, she followed her usual course of penetrating investigation. It needed no years of study, no dreary tables of figures. With what she already knew, so clearly held in mind, with a few questions each loaded with implications, she soon grasped the salient facts of Japanese civilization. Its conspicuous virtues gave her instant joy. The high honor of the Samurai, the unlimited patriotism of the people in general, the exquisite politeness, and the sincere love of beauty in nature and art—these were all comforting, and the free-footed women also, after the "golden lilies" of China.

But presently, piercing below all these, she found the general poverty of the people, their helplessness under a new and hard-grinding commercialism, and the patient ignominy in which the women lived.

"How is it, dear," she asked me, "that these keenly intelligent people fail to see that such limited women cannot produce a nobler race?"

I could only say that it was a universal failing, common to all races— except ours, of course. Her face always lighted when we spoke of America.

"You don't know how I look forward to it, dear," she said. "After this painful introduction to the world I knew so little of—I'm so glad we came this way —saving the best to the last."

The nearer we came to America and the more eagerly she spoke of it, the more my vague uneasiness increased. I began to think of things I had never before been sensitive about and to seek for justification.

Meanwhile Ellador was accumulating heart-ache over the Japanese women, whose dual duty of child-bearing and man-service dominated all their lives.

"It is so hard for me to understand, Van; they aren't people at all, somehow—just wives—or worse."

"They are mothers, surely," I urged.

"No—not in our sense, not consciously. Look at this ghastly crowding! Here's a little country, easy to grasp and manage, capable of supporting about so many people—not more. And here they are, making a 'saturated solution' of themselves. She had picked up that phrase from one of her medical friends, a vigorous young man who told her much that she was eager to know about the health and physical development of the Japanese. "Can't they see that there are too many?" she went on. "If a people increases beyond its means of support it has to endure miserable poverty—or what is that the Germans demand?—expansion! They have to have somebody else's country. How strangely dull they are!"

"But, my dear girl, please remember that this is life," I told her. "This is the world. This is the way people live. You expect too much of them. It is a law of nature to increase and multiply. Of course, Malthus set up a terrified cry about over-populating the earth, but it has not come to that yet, not near. Our means of subsistence increase with the advance of science."

"As to the world, I can see that; but as to a given country, and especially as small a one as this—what does become of them?" she asked suddenly.

This started her on a rapid study of emigration, in which, fortunately, my own knowledge was of some use; and she eagerly gathered up and arranged in her mind that feature of our history on which hangs so much, the migration and emigration of peoples. She saw at once how, when most of the earth's surface was unoccupied, people moved freely about in search of the best hunting or pasturage; how in an agricultural system they settled and spread, widening with the increase of population; how ever since they met and touched, each nation limited by its neighbors, there had been the double result of over-crowding inside the national limits, and warfare in the interests of "expansion."

"I can see now the wonderful advantage you have," she said eagerly. "Humanity got its 'second wind' with the discovery of the 'new world'—didn't it?"

It always delighted me to note the speed and correctness with which she picked up idioms and bits of slang. They were a novelty to her, and a constant delight.

"You had a big new country to spread out in, and no competitors— there were no previous inhabitants, were there?"

"Nothing but Indians," I said.

"Indians?"

"Yes, savages, like those in the forests below your mountain land, though more advanced in some ways."

"How did you arrange with them?" she asked.

"I hate to tell you, Ellador. You see you have—a little—idealized my country. We did not 'arrange' with those savages. We killed them."

"All of them? How many were there ?" She was quite calm. She made no movement of alarm or horror, but I could see the rich color fade from her face, and her dear gentle mouth set in harder lines of control.

"It is a long story, and not a nice one, I'm sorry to say. We left some, hemming them in in spots called "reservations.' There has been a good deal of education and missionary work; some Indians have become fully civilized—as good citizens as any; and some have intermarried with the whites. We have many people with Indian blood. But speaking generally this is one of our national shames. Helen Hunt wrote a book about it, called 'A Century of Dishonor.'"

Ellador was silent. That lovely faroff homesick look came into her eyes.

"I hate to disillusion you, dear heart," I said. "We are not perfect in America. I truly think we have many advantages over any other country, but we are not blameless."

"I'll defer judgment till I get there," she presently answered. "Let's go back to what we were discussing—the pressure of population."

Rather sadly we took it up again, and saw how, as long as warfare was the relief, nations continually boiled over upon one another; gaining more land by the simple process of killing off the previous owners, and having to repeat the process indefinitely as soon as the population again pressed against its limits. Where warfare was abandoned and a settled boundary established, as when great China walled itself in from marauding tribes, then the population showed an ingrowing pressure, and reduced the standard of living to a ghastly minimum. Then came the later process of peaceful emigration, by which the coasts and islands of the Pacific became tinged with the moving thousands of the Yellow Races.

She saw it all as a great panorama, an endless procession, never accepting a static world with the limitations of parti-colored maps, but always watching the movement of races.

"That's what ails Europe now, isn't it?" she said at last. "That's why those close-packed fertile races were always struggling up and down among one another, and making room, for awhile, by killing people?"

"That's certainly a good part of it," I agreed. "Every nation wants more land to accommodate its increasing population."

"And they-want an increase of population in order to win more land—don't they?"

This, too, was plain.

"And there isn't any way out of it— on a limited earth—but fixed boundaries with suicidal crowding inside, or the 'fortunes of war ?' "

That, too, was plain, unfortunately.

"Then why do not the women limit the population, as we did?"

"Oh, Ellador, Ellador—you cannot seem to realize that this world is not a woman's world, like your little country. This is a man's world—and they did not want to limit the population."

"Why not?" she urged. "Was it because they did not bear the children? Was it because they would rather fight than live in peace? What was the reason ?"

"Neither of those," I said slowly. "The real reason is that neither men nor women have been able to see broadly enough, to think deeply enough, sufficiently to visualize these great racial questions. They just followed their instincts and obeyed their ancient religions, and these things happened without their knowing why."

"But the women!" protested Ellador. "Surely the women could see as simple a thing as that. It's only a matter of square miles; how many people to a mile can live healthfully and pleasantly. Are these women willing to have their children grow up so crowded that they can't be happy, or where they'll have to fight for room to live? I can't understand it."

Then she went determinedly to question a Japanese authority, to whom we were introduced by one of our friends, as to the status of women in Japan. She was polite; she was meek; she steeled herself beforehand to hear without surprise; and the authority, also courteous to a degree, gave her a brief outline with illustrative story and quotation, of the point of view from which women were regarded in that country.

She grasped it even more thoroughly than she had in India or China.

We left Japan for Home, via Hawaii, and for days she was silent about the subject. Then, as the wide blue sea, the brilliant days spinning by, the smooth magnificence of our progress comforted her, she touched on it once more.

"I'm trying not to feel about these particularly awful things, and not to judge, even, till I know more. These things are so; and my knowing them does not make them any worse than they were before."

"You're a brave girl—and a strong one," I assured her. "That's the only way to do. I'm awfully sorry you had to have such a dose at first—this war, of all things; and then women in the East! I ought to have prepared you better."

"You could not have, dearest—it would have been impossible. No mere words could have made me visualize the inconceivable. And no matter how I came to it, slow or fast, the horror would have been the same. It is as impossible for me to make you see how I feel it now, as it would have been for you to make me feel it beforehand."

The voyage did her great good. She loved the sea, and gloried in the ships, doing her best to ignore the pitiful labor conditions of those who made the glory possible. Always she made friends—travelers, missionaries, business men, and women, wherever she found them. Yet, strangely enough, she seemed more at a loss with the women than with the men; seemed not to know, quite, how to approach them. It was not for lack of love and sympathy—far from it; she was eager to make friends with them. I finally worked out an explanation like this: She made friends with the men on the human side rather than attracting them by femininity; and as human beings they exchanged ideas and got on well together. The women were not so human; had a less wide outlook, less experience, as a rule. When she did get near enough to one of them for talk at all intimate, then came the ultra-feminine point of view, the different sense of social and moral values, the peculiar limitations of their position.

I saw this, as reflected by Ellador, as I had never seen it for myself before. What I did not understand, at first, was why she seemed to flag in interest and in patience, with the women, sooner than with the men. She never criticised them, but I could see a puzzled grieved look come over her kind face and then she would withdraw.

There were exceptions, marked ones. A woman doctor who had worked for years in China was going home for a long needed vacation, and Ellador was with her day after day, "learning," she told me. And there was another, once a missionary, now a research worker in biology, who commanded her sincere admiration.

We came to the lovely Hawaiian Islands, quite rested and refreshed, and arranged to stay there awhile and enjoy the splendor of those sea-girt mountains. Here her eager social interest was again aroused and she supplied herself with the history of this little sample of "social progress" most rapidly. There were plenty to teach her, a few excellent books to read, and numbers of most self-satisfied descendants of missionaries to boast of the noble work of their fathers.

"This is very illuminating," she told me. "It is a—what's that nice word Professor Whiting used ?—a microcosm —isn't it?"

By this time my dear investigator had as clear an idea of general human history as any one, not a specialist could wish; and had it in a very small notebook. While in England someone had given her Winwood Reade's wonderful "Martyrdom of Man," as good a basis for historical study as could be asked; and all the facts and theories she had been collecting since were duly related to her general views.

"Here you have done it so quickly— inside of a century. Only 1820—and these nice gentle golden-colored people were living here by themselves."

"They weren't always gentle—don't idealize them too much!" I interrupted.  "They had wars and quarrels, and they had a very horrid taboo religion—particularly hard on women."

"Yes—I know that—they weren't 'perfect, as we are,' as Professor Boynton used to say; but they were beautiful and healthy and happy; they were courteous and kind; and oh, how splendidly they could swim! Even the babies, they tell me."

"I've understood a child can swim earlier than it can walk—did they tell you that?"

"Yes—why not? But look here, my dear. Then came the missionaries and —interfered. Now these natives and owners of the land are only 15 per cent. of the population, with 20 per cent. of the deaths. They are dispossessed and are being exterminated."

"Yes," I said. "Well?"

Ellador looked at me. One could watch the expressions follow one another over her face, like cloud shadows and sunlight over a landscape. She looked puzzled; she evidently saw a reason. She became stern; then a further reason was recognized, and then that heavenly mother-look came over her, the one I had grown to prize most deeply.

But all she said was: "I love you. Van."

"Thank Heaven for that, my dear. I thought you were going to cast me out because of the dispossessed Hawaiians. / didn't do it—you're not blaming me, are you ?"

"Did not—America—do it?" she asked, quietly. "And do you care at all?"

Then I embarked on one of those confined and contradictory explanations by which the wolf who has eaten the lamb seeks to show how unavoidable— if not how justifiable it all was.

"Do you feel like that about England's taking the Boers' country?" she asked gently.

I did not. I had always felt that a particularly inexcusable piece of "expansion."

"And your country it not packed very close yet—is it? Having so much— why did you need these ?"

"We wanted to Christianize them— to civilize them," I urged rather sulkily.

"Do you think Christ would have had the same effect on them? And does civilization help dead people?"

She saw I was hurt, and stopped to kiss me. "Let's drop it, dear—I was wrong to press the point. But I've become so used to saying everything to you, just as if you were one of my sisters—I forget that things must look differently when one's own country is involved."

She said no more about the vanishing Hawaiians, but I began to look at them with a very different feeling from what I had ever had before. We had brought them syphilis and tuberculosis. The Chinese brought them leprosy. One of their lovely islands was now a name of horror from that ghastly disease, a place where noble Christians strive to minimize the evil—too late.

The missionaries, nobly purposed, no doubt, to begin with, had amassed great fortunes in land given to them by these careless children who knew so little of land ownership; and the children and grandchildren of the missionaries lived wealthy and powerful, proud of the "great work" of their forefathers, and apparently seeing no evil in the sad results. Perhaps they thought it was no matter how soon the natives died, so that they died Christians.

And the civilization we have brought them means an endless day of labor, long hours of grinding toil for other people's profit, in place of the clean ease and freedom of their own old life. Hard labor, disease, death; and the lasting consciousness of all this among their dwindling ranks; exclusion, social dissemination, industrial exploitation, approaching extermination—it is no wonder their music is mournful.

I was glad to leave the lovely place; glad to put aside a sense of national guilt, and to see Ellador freshen again as the golden days and velvet nights flowed over us as we steamed toward the sunrise—and Home.

There were plenty of Californians on board, both wise and unwise, and I saw my wile, with a constantly increasing case and skill, extracting information from each and all she talked with. It is not difficult to extract information about California from a Californian. Not being one myself; and having more definite knowledge about my own country than I had had about most of the others we had visited, I was able to check off this triumphant flood of "boosting" with somewhat colder facts.

Ellador liked it. "It does my heart good," she said, "both to know that there is such a country on earth, and that people can care for it like that."

She particularly revelled in Ina Coolbrith's exquisite poem "California," so rich with tender pride, with vivid appreciation. Some devotee had the book with her, and poured forth a new torrent of praise over a fine list she had of "Californian authors."

This annoyed me rather more than real estate, climate, fruit or flowers; and having been somewhat browbeaten over Hawaii, I wanted to take it out of somebody else. I am not as good as Ellador; don't pretend to be. At moments like that I don't even want to be. So I said to this bubbling enthusiast: "Why do you call all these people 'Californian authors 7 "

She looked at me in genuine surprise.

"Were they born there?" I inquired. "Are they native sons or daughters?"

She had to admit they were not, save in a few cases. We marked those who were—it was a most insufficient list.

"But they lived in California," she insisted.

"How long?" I asked. "How long a visit or residence does it take to make an author a 'Californian'—like Mark Twain, for instance? Is he 'a Connecticut author' because he lived more years than that in Connecticut, or 'a New York author' because he lived quite a while in New York?"

She looked much annoyed, and I was not a bit sorry, but went on ruthlessly: "I think California is the only state in the Union that is not content with its own crop—but tries to claim everything in sight."

Chapter 5 My Country

IN THROUGH the Golden Gate we steamed at last, one glorious morning; calm Tamalpais basking on the northern side, and the billowing city rising tumultously on the southern, with the brilliant beauty of "The Fair" glowing on the water's edge.

I had been through before, and showed her through the glass as we passed, the Seal Rocks and the Cliff House with the great Sutro Baths beside it; and then the jewelled tower, the streaming banners of that wonder-city of a year.

It was in February. There had been rain, and now the luminous rich green of the blazing sudden spring was cloaking every sloping shore. The long bay stretched wide on either hand; the fair bay cities opposite embroidered the western shore for miles; San Francisco rose before us.

Ellador stood by my side, holding my arm with tense excitement. "Your country, dear!" she said. "How beautiful it is! I shall love it!"

I was loving it myself, at that moment, as I never had before.

Behind me was that long journey of us three adventurous explorers; our longer imprisonment, and then these travels of ours, through war-torn Europe, and the slow dark reaches of the Oriental civilization.

"It certainly looks good to me!" I told her.

We spent many days at the great Exposition, and others, later, at the still lovelier, smaller one at San Diego,—days of great happiness to both of us, and real pride to me. Later on I lost this feeling —replacing it with a growing discomfort.

I suppose everyone loves and honors his own country—practically everyone. And we Americans, so young a people, so buoyantly carried along on the flood of easy geographical expansion, so suddenly increased in numbers, not by natural growth of our own stock but by crowding injections of alien blood, by vast hordes of low-grade laborers whose ignorant masses made our own ignorant masses feel superior to all the earth—we Americans are almost as boastful as the still newer Federation of Germany.

I had thought myself a sociologist, an ethnologist, one able to judge fairly from wide knowledge. And yet, with all my knowledge, with all my lucid criticism of my country's errors and shortcomings, I had kept an unshaken inner conviction of our superiority.

Ellador had shaken it.

It was not that she had found any fault with the institutions of my beloved land. Quite the contrary. She believed it faultless—or nearly so. She expected too much. Knowing her as I now did, becoming more and more familiar with the amazing lucidity and fairness of her mind, with its orderly marshalling of well-knit facts and the swinging searchlight of perception which covered every point in her field of vision, I had a strange helpless sense of coming to judgment.

In Herland I had never fully realized the quality of mind developed by their cultural system. Some of its power and clarity was of course plain to us, but we could no more measure that mind than a child can measure its teacher's. I had lived with it now, watched it work, seen it in relation to others, to those of learned men and women of various nations. There was no ostentation about Ellador's intellectual processes. She made no display of learning, did not contradict and argue. Sometimes, in questions of fact, if it seemed essential to the matter under discussion, she would quote authority in opposition, but for the most part she listened, asking a few questions to satisfy herself as to the point of view of her interlocutor. I used to note with appreciative delight how these innocent, almost irrelevant questions would bring out answers each one of which was a branching guide-post as to the mind of the speaker. Sometimes just two would show him to be capable of believing flat contradictions, or merely one would indicate a limitation of knowledge or an attitude of prejudice which "placed" the man at once. These were not "smart" questions, with a flippantly triumphant and all-toological demand at the end, leaving the victim confused and angry. He never realized what was being done to him.

"How do you have patience with these chumps ?" I asked her. "They seem like children in your hands—and yet you don't hurt them a bit."

"Perhaps that is why," she answered gravely. "We are so used to children, at home And when a whole country is always, more or less, teaching children— why it makes us patient, I suppose. What good would it do to humiliate these people? They all know more than I do— about most things."

"They may know more, about some things, but it's their mental processes that seem so muddy—so sticky—so slow and fumbling somehow."

"You're right there, Van. It impresses me very much. There is an enormous fund of knowledge in the minds of your people—I mean any of these people I have met, but the minds themselves are —to me—astonishing. The Oriental mind is far more highly developed than the Occidental—in some lines; but as serenely unconscious of its limits as—as the other is. What strikes me most of all is the lack of connection between all this knowledge they have accumulated, and the way they live. I'm hoping to find it wholly different here. You Americans, I understand, are the people who do things."

Before I go on with Ellador's impressions of America I want to explain a little further, lest my native-born fellowcitizens resent too bitterly her ultimate criticisms. She perhaps would not have published those criticisms at all; but I can—now.

The sensitiveness I felt at first, the hurt pride, the honest pain, as my pet ideals inexorably changed color under that searchlight of hers, do what I would to maintain them in their earlier glory— all this is outgrown. I love my country, better than I ever did before. I understand it better—probably that accounts for the increased tenderness and patience. But if ever a country needed to wake up and look itself in the face, it is this one.

Ellador, in that amazing little pocket history she compiled, had set up the "order of exercises" in our development, and placed the nations in due sequence as contributors. Running over its neat pages, with the outline maps, the charts with their varied washes of color, showing this or that current of tendency and pressure of condition, one gathered at once a clear bird's eye view of what humanity had been doing all this time. She speculated sagely, with me, as to what trifling deflection of type, what variation in environment, was responsible for the divigation of races; especially those of quite recent common stock. But in the little book was no speculation, merely the simple facts.

Referring to it she could show in a few moments what special influences made Egypt Egypt, and differentiated Assyria from Chaldea. She shook her head sadly over those long early ages.

"They were slow to learn, weren't they?" she'd say; "Never seemed to put two and two together at all. I suppose that peculiar arrest of the mental processes was due first to mere social inertia, with its piled up weight of custom, and then much more to religion. That finality, that 'believing', seemed to put an end to real thinking and learning."

"But, my dear," interposed, "they were learned, surely. The ancient priests had practically all the learning, and in the Dark Ages, the Church in Europe was all that kept learning alive at all."

"Do you mean 'learning^ dear, or just 'remembering'?" she asked. "What did the Mediaeval Church 'learn'?"

This was a distinction I had never thought of. Of course what we have always called "learning" was knowing what went before—long before—and mostly what people had written. Still I made out something of a case about the study of alchemy and medicine—which she gravely admitted.

It remained true that the Church, any church, in any period, had set its face like a flint against the people's learning anything new; and, as we commonly know, had promptly punished the most progressive.

"It is a wonder to me," said Ellador, tenderly, "that you have done as well as you have—with all these awful handicaps. But you—America!—you have a different opportunity. I don't suppose you quite realize yourselves what a marvellous difference there is between you and every other people on earth."

Then she pointed out, briefly, how by the start in religious rebellion we had set free the mind from its heaviest shackles; by throwing off the monarchy and aristocracy we had escaped another weight; how our practically unlimited area and fluctuating condition made custom but a name; and how the mixture of races broke the current of heredity.

All this we had gone over on the steamer, sitting by the hour in our long chairs, watching the big smooth swells roll by, and talking of my country.

"You have reason to be proud," she would say. "No people on earth ever had such a chance.

I used to feel misgivings then, especially after Hawaii. I tried to arrange 6ome satisfying defense for our treatment of the Asiatics, the Negroes, Mexico. I thought up all that I could to excuse the open evils that I knew—intemperance, prostitution, graft, lynching. I began to see more holes in the bright fabric of Columbia's robe than I had ever noticed before—and bigger ones. But at that I did not anticipate .

We spent several weeks in California. I took her to see Shasta, the Yosemite, the cedars of Monterey, the Big Trees, the Imperial Valley. All through the country she poured out constant praises of the boundless loveliness of the land, the air, the sunshine, even the rain. Rain did not depress Ellador—she was a forester.

And she read, avidly. She read John Muir with rapture. "How I should have loved him!" she said. She read the brief history of the state, and some books about it—Ramona, for instance. She visited and talked with some leading Japanese— and Chinamen. And she read steadily, with a fixed non-committal face, the newspapers.

If I asked her anything about it all she would pour forth honest delight in the flowers and fruit, the beauty and brightness of the land. If I pressed for more, she would say: "Wait, Van dear— give me time. I've only just come—I don't know enough yet to talk!"

But, I knowing how quickly she learned, and how accurately she related new knowledge to old, watched her face with growing dismay. In Europe I had seen that beautiful face pale with horror; in Asia, sicken with loathing; now, after going around the world; after reaching this youngest land, this land of hope and pride, of wealth and power, I saw that face I loved so well, set in sad lines of disappointment—fairly age before my eyes.

She was still cheerful, with me, still happy out of doors; and her heart rose as I had hoped it would among the mountains, on the far-spread lustrous deserts, in that wordless wonder, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

But as she read, as she sat thinking, I could see the light die out of her face and a depressing look creep over it; a look of agonized disappointment, yet of patience too—and a courageous deep determination. It was as if a mother had learned that her baby was an idiot. * * *

As we drew eastward and the cities grew larger, noiser, blacker, her distress increased. She began to urge me to play games with her; to read aloud from books she loved; and especially to talk of Herland.

I was willing; more than willing. As I saw my country through her eyes—as I saw its effect on her—I became less and less inclined, indeed less able, to discuss with her it. But the tension grew; her suffering increased; until I told her as I had that terrible night in Europe, that she must talk to me about it.

"You see you will have to, whether you want to or not," I argued. "You cannot take all America to task about itself—you would get yourself disliked. Besides—if you don't want to tell them about your country—and if you pitch into theirs, they will insist on knowing where you come from, quite naturally. I can't bear to see you getting more and more distressed and saying nothing about it. Besides—it is barely possible that I might offer some palliation, or explanation, of some of the worst things."

"What do you consider the worst things'?" she asked casually enough.

But I was already wise enough to see at once that we might not agree on definition.

"Suppose we do this," I suggested. "Here are you, as extramundane as a Martian. You are like an Investigating Committee from another world. Quite apart from my love for you, my sympathy with you, my admiration for you—yes, all serious and sincere, my dear—I do appreciate this unparalleled opportunity to get a real outsider's point of view.

"This is something that never happened before, you see; Marco Polo came nearest to it, perhaps, when he went poking into the Asiatic wonderland. But these old adventurers of ours, whatever their hardships, never took it so hard as you do. They enjoyed satisfying their curiosity; they always thought their own birthplace infinitely superior, and the more inferior they found other places the more they enjoyed it. -Now with you—it seems to hurt your feelings most horribly. I wish you could somehow detach yourself from it—so that you could learn, and not suffer."

"You are quite right, dear boy—it is most unphilosophical of me. I suppose it is largely a result of our long period of —lovingness—at home, that things strike so harshly on my mind."

"And partly your being a woman, don't you think ?" I urged. "You see yours is a feminine culture and naturally more sensitive, isn't it?"

"Perhaps that i s it," she said, pondering. "The very first thing that strikes me in this great rich lovely land of yours is its unmotherliness. We are of course used to seeing everything taken care of."

"But surely, it was worse—far worse —in the other countries wasn't it?"

She smiled tenderly and sadly. "Yes, Van, it was—but here—well, doubtless I expected too much."

"But isn't there some comfort in the contrast?" I asked eagerly. "Here is not the petrified oppression, the degradation of women, that so sickened you in Asia; and here is not the wild brutality of war that so horrified you in Europe."

"No—not either of those," she slowly agreed. "But you see I had warning that Europe was at war, and had read about it a little. It was like going into a— a slaughter-house, for the first time.

"Then all I learned in my studies in Europe prepared me to find what I did find in Asia—Asia was in some ways better than I had been told—in some ways worse. But here! * * * Oh, Van!" That look of gray anguish had settled on her face again. She seized my arms, held me fast, searched my face as if I was withholding something. Big slow tears welled over and dropped. "This is the , top of the tree, Van; this is the last young nation, beginning over again in a New World—a New World! Here was everything to make life richly happy—everything. And you had all the dreadful record of the past to guide you, to teach you at least what not to do. You had courage; you had independence; you had intelligence, education, opportunity. And such splendid principles to start with— such high ideals. And then all kinds of people coming! Oh, surely, surely, surely this should be the Crown of the World!

"Why, Van—Europe was like a man with—with delirium tremens. Asia was like something gnarled and twisted with hopeless age. But America is a Splendid Child … with … " She covered her face with her hands.

I couldn't stand this. I was an American, and she was my wife. I took her in my arms.

"Look here, you blessed Herlander," I said, "I'm not going to have my country wiped off the map in disgrace. You must remember that all judgment is comparative. You cannot compare any other country with your country for two reasons; first your long isolation, and second that miraculous manlessness of yours.

"This world of ours has been in more or less intercouse and exchange for many more thousands of years than Herland has lived. We Americans were not a new created race—we were just English and Dutch and French and Scandinavian and Italian, and so on—just everybody. We brought with us our inherited tendencies, of course—all of them. And while we did make a clean break with some of the old evils, we had no revelation as to a perfect social method. You are expecting too much …

"Don't you see," I went on, for she said nothing, "that a Splendid Child may be a pretty bad child, somtimes, and may have the measles pretty hard—and yet not be hopeless ?"

She rased her wet face from my shoulder and her own warm loving smile illuminated it once more.

"You're right, Van, you're wholly right," she agreed. "I was most unreasonable, most unwise. It is just a piece of the same world—a lot of pieces—mixed samples—on a new piece of ground. And it was a magnificent undertaking—I can see that—and you are young, aren't you? Oh, Van dear, you do make it easier."

I held her very close for awhile. This journey among strange lands had brought me one deep joy. Ellador had grown to need me as she never did in her own peaceful home.

"You see, dearest," I said, "you have a dual mission. You are to study all about the world and take your knowledge back with you—but all you need of it there is to decide whether you'll come out and play with us or not—or let any more of us come in. Then you have what I, as a citizen of the rest of the world— rather the biggest part of it, consider a more important duty. If that Herland mind of yours can find out what ails us —and how we are to mend it; if your little country with its strange experiment can bring aid in solving the problems of the world—that is what I call a Historic Mission! How does that strike you, Mrs. Jennings ?"

It was good to see her rise to it. That wonderful motherheart, which all those women had, seemed to shine out like a sunrise. I went on, delighted with my success.

"I'll just forget I'm an American," I said. "This country is The Child. I'm not its father or anything—I'm just a doctor, a hygienist, an investigator. You're another—and a bigger one. Now I understand that you find The Child is in a bad way—worse off than I thought it was. To judge from your expression, dear, on several occasions, you think it is a very dirty child, a careless child, a wasteful child, with a bad temper and no manners—am I right?"

"Not about the temper, dear. Pettish at times, but not vindictive, and very, very kind… . Van … I think I've been too hard on The Child 1 I'm quite ashamed. Yes, we are two investigators—I'm so glad there are two !"

She stopped and looked at me with an expression I never saw enough of, that I used to long for in vain, at first; that look as if she needed me.

"No matter what we have in Herland," she said slowly, "we miss this—this united feeling. It grows, Van; I feel more and more as if—somehow or other —we were really blended. We have nothing just like it."

"No, you haven't—with all your Paradise. So let's allow some good things in your 'case', and particularly in this case of the bad child. And we'll pitch in and work out a diagnosis—won't we? And then prescribe."

We pitched in.

First she had insisted on knowing the whole country. We made a sort of spiral, beginning on the outside, and circulated south, east, north, west, and so over again; till we wound ourselves up in Topeka. By that time we had been in every state, in all the principal cities, and in many of those tiny towns which are more truly indicative of the spirit of the community than the larger ones.

When we were interested in a given place we would stay awhile—there was nothing to hurry us; and when Ellador showed signs of wear and tear there was always some sweet wild country to fly to, and rest. She sampled both sea-coasts, the Great Lakes, and some little ones, many a long winding river, mountains wooded and mountains bare; the restful plains, the shadowy cypress swamps.

Her prompt reaction to the beauty of the real country was always beneficial, and, to my great delight she grew to love it, and even to feel a pride in its vast extent and variety—just as I did. We both admitted that it was a most illegitimate ground for pride, but we both felt it.

As she saw more of the cities, and of the people, by mere usage she grew accustomed to what had grieved her most at first. Also I suggested a method which she gladly used, and found most comforting, in which we classified all the evils as "transient", and concerned ourselves merely with finding out how they came there and how to remove them.

"Some of these things you'll just outgrow," she said relievedly. "Some are already outgrown. America is not nearly so —cocky—as Dickens found her. She is now in an almost morbid attitude of selfdistrust and condemnation—but she'll outgrow that too."

It was a great relief to me to have her push through that period of shocked disappointment so readily. But of course the vigor of her mental constitution made it possible for her to throw off a trouble like that more easily than we can do it.

She soon devised methods of her own of acquiring further information. In her capacity of a traveler, and recently come from the seat of war, to say nothing of the Orient, she found frequent opportunity for addressing women's clubs, churches and forums of various -kinds, and so coming in touch with large bodies of people; and their reactions.

"I am learning to realize 'the popular mind'," she said. "I can already distinguish between the different parts of the country. And, oh, Van " she laughed a little, caught her breath over, and added with an odd restraint: "I'm getting to know the—women."

"Why do you say it like that?" I inquired.

She looked at me in what I might describe as "forty ways at once." It was funny. There was such an odd mixture of pride and shame, of hope and disillusionment ; of a high faith and a profound distrust.

"I can stand it," she protested. "The Child is by no means hopeless—in fact I begin to think it is a very promising child, Van. But, oh, how it does behave!"

And she laughed.

I was a little resentful. We were such good chums by this time; we had played together such a lot, and studied together so widely; we had such a safe foundation of mutual experience that I began to dare to make fun of my strange Princess now and then, and she took it most graciously.

"There's one thing I won't stand for," I told her solemnly. "You can call my country a desert, my people incompetent, dishonest, wasteful and careless to a degree ; you can blackguard our agriculture, horticulture, aboriculture, floriculture, viticulture, and — and — ("Apiculture," she suggested, with a serious face.)—you can deride our architecture and make trivial objections to the use of soot as a civic decoration; but there is one thing I, as an American Man, will not stand— you mustn't criticize our Women !"

"I won't," she said meekly, a twinkle in her eye. "I won't say one word about them, dear—until you ask me to !"

Whereat I knew that my doom was sealed once more. Could I rest without knowing what she thought of them?

Chapter 6 The Diagnosis

HOW are you getting on with 'The Case,' Mrs. J.?" I asked Ellador one evening when she seemed rather discouraged. "What symptoms are worrying you most now ?"

She looked at me with wide anxious eyes, too much in earnest to mind the "Mrs. J.," which usually rather teased her.

"It's, an awfully important case, Van dear," she answered soberly, "and a serious one—very serious, I think. I've been reading a lot, had to, to get background and perspective, and I feel as if I understood a good deal better. Still ——. You helped me ever so much by saying that you were not new people, just mixed "Europeans. But the new country and the new conditions began to make you all into a new people. Only ——."

"These pauses are quite terrifying," I protested. "Won't you explain your ominous 'still,' and sinister 'only'!"

She smiled a little. "Why the 'still' should have been followed by the amount which I did not understand, and the 'only' ——." She stopped again.

"Well, out with it, my dear. Only what?" "Only you have done it too fast and too much in the dark. You weren't conscious you see."

"Not conscious—America not conscious ?"

"Not self-conscious, I mean, Van."

This I scouted entirely, till she added patiently: "Perhaps I should say nationally conscious, or socially conscious. You were plunged into an enormous social enterprise, a huge swift, violent experiment ; the current of social evolution burst forth over here like a subterranean river finding an outlet. Things that the stratified crust of Asia could not let through, and the heavy shell of European culture could not either, just burst forth over here and swept you along. Democracy had been—accumulating, through all the centuries. The other nations forced it back, held it down. It boiled over in France, but the lid was clapped on again for awhile. Here it could pour forward —and it poured. Then all the people of the same period of social development wanted to come too, and did,—lots of them. That was inevitable. All that 'America' means in this sense is a new phase of social development, and anyone can be an American who belongs to it."

"Guess you are right so far, Mrs. Doctor. Go ahead!"

"But while this was happening to you, you were doing things yourselves, some of them in line with your real position and movement, some dead against it. For instance, your religion."

"Religion against what? Expound further."

"Against Democracy."

"You don't mean the Christian religion, do you?" I urged, rather shocked.

"Oh, no, indeed. That would have been a great help to the world if they had ever taken it up."

I was always entertained and somewhat startled by Ellador's detached view. She knew the same facts so familiar to us, but they had not the same connotations.

"I think Jesus was simply wonderful," she went on. "What a pity it was he did not live longer!"

This was a new suggestion to me. Of course I no longer accepted that pitiful old idea of his being a pre-arranged sacrifice to his own father, but I never deliberately thought of his having continued alive, and its possible effects.

"He is supposed to have been executed at about the age of thirty-three, was he not ?" she went on. "Think of it—hardly a grown man! He should have had thirty or forty more years of teaching. It would all have become clearer, more consistent. He would have worked things out, explained them, made people understand. He would have made clear to them what they were to do. It was an awful loss."

I said nothing at all, but watched the sweet earnest face, the wise far-seeing eyes, and really agreed with her, though in my mind rose a confused dim throng of horrified objections belonging not to my own mind, but to those of other people.

"Tell me how you mean that our religion was against democracy," I persisted.

"It was so personal," she said, "and so unjust. There must have crept into it, in early times, a lot of the Buddhist philosophy, either direct or filtered, the 'acquiring merit' idea, and ascetism. The worst part of all was the idea of sacrifice—that is so ancient. Of course what Jesus meant was social unity, that your neighbor was yourself—that we were all one humanity—'many gifts, but the' same spirit.' He must have meant that—for that is So.

"What I mean by 'your religion' is the grade of Calvinism which dominated young America, with the still older branches, and the various small newer ones. It was all so personal. My soul— my salvation. My conscience—my sins. And here was the great living working truth of democracy carrying you on in spite of yourselves—E Pluribus Unum.

"Your economic philosophy was dead against it too—that foolish laissez-faire idea. And your politics, though what was new in it started pretty well, has never been able to make much headway against the highest religious sanction, the increasing economic pressure, and the general drag of custom and tradition— inertia."

"You are somewhat puzzling," my fair Marco Polo," I urged. "So you mean to extol our politics, American politics?"

"Why of course!" she said, her eyes shining. "The principles of democracy are wholly right. The law of federation, the method of rotation in office, the stark necessity for general education that the people may understand clearly, the establishment of liberty—that they may act freely—it is splendidly, gloriously right! But why do I say this to an American!"

"I wish you could say it to every American man, woman, and child," I answered soberly. "Of course we used to feel that way about it, but things have changed somehow."

"Yes, yes," she went on eagerly. "That's what I mean. You started right, for the most part, but those highminded brave old ancestors of yours did not understand sociology—how should they? it wasn't even born. They did not know how society worked, or what would hurt it the most. So the preachers went on exhorting the people to save their own souls, or get it done for them by imputed virtues of someone else—and no one understood the needs of the country.

"Why, Van! Vandyke Jennings! As I understand more and more how noble and courageous and high-minded was this Splendid Child, and then see it now, bloated and weak, with unnatural growth, preyed on by all manner of parasites inside and out, attacked by diseases of all kinds, sneered at, criticized, condemned by the older nations, and yet bravely stumbling on, making progress in spite of it all—I'm getting to just love America !"

That pleased me, naturally, but I didn't like her picture of my country as bloated and verminous. I demanded explanation.

"Do you think we're too big ?" I asked. "Too much country to be handled properly?"

"Oh, no!" she answered promptly. "Not too big in land. That would have been like the long lean lines of youth, the far-reaching bones of a country gradually rounding out and filling in as you grow. But you couldn't wait to grow, you just —swelled."

"What on earth do you mean, Ellador?"

"You have stuffed yourself with the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that ever was held together by artificial means," she answered remorselessly. "You go to England, and the people are English. Only three per cent. of aliens even in London, I understand. And in France the people are French—bless them! And in Italy, Italian. But here—it's no wonder I was discouraged at first. It has taken a lot of study and hard thinking, to see a way out at all. But I do see it. It was simply awful when I begun.

"Just look! Here you were, a little band of really promising people, of different nations, yet of the same general stock, and like-minded—that was the main thing. The real union is the union of idea; without that—no nation. You made settlements, you grew strong and bold, you shook off the old government. you set up a new flag, and then——!"

"Then," said I proudly, we opened our arms to all the world, if that is what you are finding fault with. We welcomed other people to our big new country— 'the poor and oppressed of all nations!' I quoted solemnly.

"That's what I mean by saying you i were ignorant of sociology," was her I cheerful reply. "It never occurred to you , that the poor and oppressed were not necessarily good stuff for a democracy."

I looked at her rather rebelliously.

"Why just study them," she went on, in that large sweeping way of hers. "Hadn't there been poor and oppressed enough in the past? In Chaldaea and Assyria and Egypt and Rome—in all Europe—every where ? Why, Van, it is the poor and oppressed who make monarchy and despotism—don't you see that ?'

"Hold on, my dear—hold on! This is too much. Are you blaming the poor helpless things for their tyrannical oppression ?"

"No more than I blame an apple-tree for bearing apples," she answered. "You don't seriously advance the idea that the oppressor began it, do you ? Just one oppressor jumping on the necks of a thousand free men ? Surely you see that the general status and character of a people creates and maintains its own kind of government ?"

"Y-e-es," I agreed. "But all the same, they are human, and if you give them proper conditions they can all rise— surely we have proved that."

"Give them proper conditions, and give them time—yes."

"Time! They do it in one generation. We have citizens, good citizens, of all races, who were born in despotic countries, all equal in our democracy."

"How many Chinese and Japanese citizens have you ?" she asked quietly. "How are your African citizens treated in this 'equal' democracy!"

This was rather a facer.

"About the first awful mistake you made was in loading yourself up with those reluctant Africans," Ellador went on. "If it wasn't so horrible, it would be funny, awfully funny. A beautiful healthy young country, saddling itself with an antique sin every other civilized nation had repudiated. And here they are, by millions and millions, flatly denied citizenship, socially excluded, an enormous alien element in your democracy."

"They are not aliens," I persisted stoutly. "They are Americans, loyal Americans; they make admirable soldiers "

"Yes, and servants. You will let them serve you and fight for you—but that's all, apparently. Nearly a tenth of the population, and not part of the democracy. And they never asked to come!"

"Well," I said, rather sullenly. "I admit it—everyone does. It was an enormous costly national mistake, and we paid for it heavily. Also it's there yet, an unsolved question. I admit it all. Go on please. We were dead wrong on the blacks, and pretty hard on the reds; we may be wrong on the yellows. I guess this is a white man's country, isn't it? You're not objecting to the white immigrants, are you ?"

"To legitimate immigrants, able and willing to be American citizens, there can be no objection, unless even they come too fast. But to millions of deliberately imported people, not immigrants at all, but victims, poor ignorant people scraped up by paid agents, deceived by lying advertisements, brought over here by greedy American ship owners and employers of labor—there are objections many and strong."

"But, Ellador—even granting it is you say, they too can be made into American citizens, surely?"

"They can be, but are they ? I suppose you all tacitly assume that they are; but an outsider does not see it. We have been all over the country now, pretty thoroughly. I have met and talked with people of all classes and all races, both men and women. Remember I'm new to 'the world,' and I've just come here from studying Europe, and Asia, and Africa. I have the hinterland of history pretty clearly summarized, though of course I can't pretend to be thorough, and I tell you, Van, there are millions of people in your country who do not belong to it at all."

She saw that I was about to defend our foreign born, and went on:

"I do not mean the immigrants solely. There are Bostonians of Beacon Hill who belong in London; there are New Yorkers of five generations who belong in Paris; there are vast multitudes who belong in Berlin, in Dublin, in Jerusalem; and there are plenty of native Sons and Daughters of the Revolution who are aristocrats, plutocrats, anything but democrats."

"Why of course there are! We believe in having all kinds—there's room for everybody—this is the 'melting-pot,' you know."

"And do you think that you can put a little of everything into a melting-pot and produce a good metal? Well fused and flawless? Gold, silver, copper and iron, lead, radium, pipe clay, coal dust, and plain dirt ?"

A simile is an untrustworthy animal if you ride it too hard. I grinned and admitted that there were limits to the powers of fusion.

"Please understand," she urged gently. "I am not looking down on one kind of people because they are different from others. I like them all. I think your prejudice against the black is silly, wicked, and—hypocritical. You have no idea how ridiculous it looks, to an outsider, to hear your Southern enthusiasts raving about the horrors of 'miscegenation' and then to count the mulattos, quadroons, octoroons and all the successive shades by which the black race becomes white before their eyes. Or to see them shudder at 'social equality' while the babies are nourished at black breasts, and cared for in their most impressionable years by black nurses—their children!"

She stopped at that, turned away from me and walked to the opposite window, where she stood for some time with her hands clenched and her shoulders heaving.

"Where was I?" she asked presently, definitely dropping the question of children. "Black—yes, and how about the yellow? Do they 'melt'? Do you want them to melt? Isn't your exclusion of them an admission that you think some kinds of people unassimilable ? That democracy must pick and choose a little ?"

"What would you have us do ?" I asked rather sullenly. "Exclude everybody? Think we are superior to the whole world?"

Ellador laughed, and kissed me. "I think you are," she whispered tenderly. "No—I don't mean that at all. It would be too great a strain on the imagination! If you want a prescription—far too late —it is this: i Democracy is a psychic relation. It requires the intelligent conscious co-operation of a great many persons all 'equal' in the characteristics required to play that kind of a game. You could have safely welcomed to your great undertaking people of every race and nation who were individually fitted to assist. Not by any means because they were 'poor and oppressed,' nor because of that glittering generality that 'all men are born free and equal,' but because the human race is in different stages of development, and only some the races—or some individuals in a given race—have reached the democratic stage."

"But how could we discriminate?"

"You mustn't ask me too much, Van. I'm a stranger; I don't know all I ought to, and, of course I'm all the time measuring by my background of experience in my own country. I find you people talk a good bit about the Brotherhood of Man, but you haven't seemed to think about the possibilities of a sisterhood of women."

I looked up alertly, but she gave a mischievous smile and shook her head. "You do not want to hear about the women, I remember. But seriously, dear, this is one of the most dangerous mistakes you have made; it complicates everything. It makes your efforts to establish democracy like trying to make a ship go by steam and at the same time admitting banks of oars, masses of sails and cordage, and mere paddles and outriggers."

"You can certainly make some prescription for this particularly dreadful state, can't you?" I urged. "Sometimes 'an outsider' can see better than those who are—being melted."

She pondered awhile, then began slowly: "Legitimate immigration is like the coming of children to you,—new blood for the nation, citizens made, not born. And they should be met like children, with loving welcome, with adequate preparation, with the fullest and wisest education for their new place. Where you have that crowded little filter on Ellis Island, you ought to have Immigration Bureaus on either coast, at ports so specified, with a great additional department to definitely Americanize the newcomers, to teach them the language, spirit, traditions and customs of the country. Talk about offering hospitality to all the world! What kind of hospitality is it to let your guests crowd and pack into the front hall, and to offer them neither bed, bread nor association? That's what I mean by saying that you are not conscious. You haven't taken your immigration seriously enough. The consequence is that you are only partially America, an American clogged and confused, weakened and mismanaged, for lack of political compatibility."

"Is this all?" I asked after a little. "You make me feel as if my country was a cross between a patchwork quilt and a pudding stone.'

"Oh, dear, no f" she cheerfully assured me. "That's only a beginning of my diagnosis. The patient's worst disease was that disgraceful out-of-date attack of slavery, only escaped by a surgical operation, painful, costly, and not by any means wholly successful. The second is this chronic distension from absorbing too much and too varied material, just pumping it in at wild speed. The third is the most conspicuously foolish of all —to a Herlander."

"Oh—leaving the women out ?"

"Yes. It's so—so—well, I can't express to you how ridiculous it looks.

"We're getting over it," I urged. "Eleven states now, you know—it's getting on."

"Oh, yes, yes, it's getting on. But I'm looking at your history, and your conditions, and your loud complaints, and then to see this great mass of fellowcitizens treated as if they weren't there— it is unbelievable!"

"But I told you about that before we came," said I. "I told you in Herland —you knew it."

"I knew it, truly. But, Van, suppose anyone had told you that in Herland women were the only citizens—would that have prevented your being surprised ?"

I looked back for a moment, remembering how we men, after living there so long, after "knowing" that women were the only citizens, still never got over the ever recurring astonishment of realising it.

"No wonder it surprises you, dear,—I should think it would. But go on about the women."

"I'm not touching on the women at all, Van. This is only in treating of democracy—of your country and what ails it. You see: "

"Well, dear? See what?"

"It is so presumptuous of me to try to explain democracy to you, an American citizen. Of course you understand, but evidently the country at large doesn't. In a monarchy you have this one allowed Ruler, and his subordinate rulers, and the people submit to them. Sometimes it works very well, but in any case it is something done for and to the people by someone they let do it.

"A democracy, a real one, means the people socially conscious and doing it themselves—doing it themselves! Not just electing a Ruler and subordinates and submitting to them—transferring the divine right of kings to the divine right of alderman or senators. A democracy is a game everybody has to play—has to —else it is not a democracy. And here you people deliberately left out half!"

"But they never had been 'in'; you know, in the previous governments."

"Now, Van—that's really unworthy of you. As subjects they were the same as men, and as queens they were the same as kings. But you began a new game— that you said must be 'by the people'— and so on, and left out half."

"It was—funny," I admitted, "and unfortunate. But we're improving. Do go on.

"That's three counts, I believe," she agreed. "Next lamentable mistake,—failure to see that democracy must be economic."

"Meaning socialism?"

"No, not exactly. Meaning what Socialism means, or ought to mean. You could not have a monarchy where the king was in no way different from his subjects. A monarchy must be expressed not only in the immediate symbols of robe and crown, throne and sceptre, but in the palace and the court, the list of lords and gentlemen-in-waiting. It's all part of monarchy.

"So you cannot have a democracy while there are people markedly differentiated from the others, with symbolism of dress and decoration, with courts and palaces and crowds of servitors."

"You can't except all the people to be just alike, can you ?"

"No, nor even to be 'equal.' Some people will always be more valuable than others, and some more useful than others; but a poet, a blacksmith, and a dancing master might all be friends and fellow-citizens in a true democratic sense. Your millionaires vote and your daylaborers vote, but it does not bring them together as fellow citizens. That's why your little old New England towns and your fresh young western ones, have more of 'America' in them than is possible—could ever be possible—in such a political menagerie as New York, for instance.

"Meaning the Tiger?" I inquired.

"Including the Tiger, with the Elephant, the Moose and the Donkey—especially the Donkey! No—I do not really mean those—totems. I mean the weird collection of political methods, interests, stages of growth.

"New York's an oligarchy; it's a plutocracy; it's a hierarchy; it reverts to the clan system with its Irishmen, and back of that, to the patriarchy, with its Jews. It's anything and everything you like— but it's not a democracy."

"If it was, what would it do to prove it ? Just what do you expect of what you call democracy? Don't you idealize it?" I asked.

"No." She shook her head decidedly. "I do not idealize it. I'm familiar with it, you see—we have one at home, you know."

So they had. I had forgotten. In fact I had not very clearly noticed. We had been so much impressed by their all being women that we had not done justice to their political development."

"It's no miracle," she said. "Just people co-operating to govern themselves. We have universal suffrage, you know, and train our children in the use of it before they come to the real thing. That farseeing Mr. Gill is trying to do that in your public schools, I notice, and Mr. George of the Junior Republics. It requires a common knowledge of the common need, local self-management, recognizing the will of the majority, and a big ceaseless loving effort to make the majority wiser. It's surely nothing so wonderful, Van, for a lot of intelligent people to get together and manage their common interests."

It certainly had worked well in Herland. So well, so easily, so smoothly, that it was hardly visible.

"But the people who get together have got to be within reach of one another," she went on. "They've got to have common interests. What united action can you expect between Fifth Avenue and— Avenue A?"

"I've had all I can stand for one dose, my lady," I now protested. "From what you have said I should think your 'Splendid Child' would have died in infancy— a hundred years ago. But we haven't you see. We're alive and kicking—especially kicking. I have faith in my country yet."

"It is still able to lead the world—if it will," she agreed. "It has still all the natural advantages it began with, and it has added new ones. I'm not despairing, nor blaming, Van—I'm diagnosing, and pretty soon I'll prescribe. But just now I suggest that we change politics for tennis."

We did. I can still beat her at tennis— having played fifteen years to her one— but not so often as formerly.