And there is another side to this question which should be mentioned in justice to all concerned. In our day respectable women are by no means all of the class described as the saintly angels of the home, who rouse all the chivalrous instincts of a gentleman, whether he be a resident of South Carolina, South Dakota, or Kamchatka.
In our day women are facing men as competitors in business and in the professions. The modern woman of the advanced type refuses to be longer regarded as a gentler and saintlier type of humanity, who must be petted, reverenced, and protected. She prefers to renounce her former superiority of a certain kind for an equality which essentially involves a different plane of communication.
That all this foreshadows a certain modification of the old-time approved relations between the sexes is as obvious as it is inevitable.
WHAT WE ARE DOING TO THE RED MAN.
Recent Abolishment of Tribal Rule in Indian
Territory Will Have Powerful
Effect for Good or Ill.
Are we all to be Indians? There are ethnologists who say that in successive generations the features of Americans are gradually succumbing to the persistent influence of their climatic environment; that a few centuries will see us a race, high-cheek-boned, Roman-nosed.
Frederick R. Burton touches the question in the London Sphere. He says:
As I have studied the Indian in the field I have been interested in speculating—in an unscientific way, for my research was not concerned with physical characteristics—on the possible chance of the Indian's features consequent upon his advancing civilization. Indeed, I have often thought, though imagined may be the better word, that in Indians of education I have observed a distinct softening of the traditional type and an approximation to the features of the European.
The Indian is becoming civilized very rapidly. His appearance has already undergone great change through his general disregard of native dress, and after a few generations of living indoors and under bowler hats, is it not reasonable to suppose that he will look more like the Yankee than he does now, and thus justify the anthropologist's theory by a reversal of the process of reasoning?
The Indian, indeed, is rapidly being absorbed. On the 4th of last March tribal government was abolished in the Indian Territory. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes, numbering, all told, one hundred and two thousand souls, and claiming to have enjoyed continuous independent civil government since long before Columbus discovered America, are now just plain citizens of the United States. The tribal land has been divided among them, to be owned by individuals in fee simple; the right to vote has been extended to them; their separate, independent constitutions, legislatures, and judiciaries have entirely disappeared.