was the first of countries to give woman the right to vote, in 1893.

The weakness of the women's movement arises

chiefly from the weakness of women's solidarity, since the inter-ests of the bourgeois woman con-flict with the interests of the work-ing woman; and the liberation of women requires the abolition of the class system and their liberation from ignorance and idleness. The truth is that the peasant woman, or the woman working in the factory, is freer than the parasitic wife of the rich man, who depends on her husband for her living — so that he is able to shut her in a golden cage and tighten the noose upon her.

At last, after a long struggle and a gradual development, the women's movement won its victory, and the statutes in America and in most of the countries of Europe now make woman man's equal in the rights of property, inheritance, and work, in the penal law, in political rights, and then in civil rights, or the law of marriage and divorce. Even so, woman in the West still labors under the yoke of the old traditions: her wages are in most cases below the wages of man; her means of advancement are narrow and limited; and having won the change of the statutes, she finds herself compelled to change the mentality of society — above all the mentality of man, who still looks upon her

with the look of the higher upon the lower.

As for the Arab lands, Lebanon among them, not the least change has occurred in the statutes con-cerning woman; indeed she remains subject, in the civil and penal law and elsewhere, to the statutes of the Middle Ages. The only change that has occurred is the spread of learning among women, and their knocking at new doors of work in the factories, the offices, the schools, and the other institutions newly established in our country. But their work is limited and narrow in scope, and is but one step of many steps which woman must take in the near future.