Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/71

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Our Loss of Nerve

not make the man, but they show him for what he is." Qualities nourished by this stern and sane doctrine die with the withering of faith.

So much well-meant, but not harmless nonsense—nonsense is never harmless—has been preached concerning women and their wages, that we are in the predicament of Sydney Smith when Macaulay flooded him with talk. We positively "stand in the slops." A professor of economics in an American college offers out of the fulness of his heart the following specific and original remedy for existing ills: "My idea is that one of the best ways to get an increased remuneration for women is to make them worth it."

"My idea!" This is what it means to have the scientific mind at work. A unique proposition (what have we been thinking about with our free schools for the past hundred years?), unclogged by detail, unhampered by ways and means. And if we do not see salvation in truisms,

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