en or
earth that will quench it, and that is life-blood. Sometimes I have
asked in anguish of spirit: "Will women give it?" I believe they will.
But, whether we give it or not, what Matthew Arnold called "the noblest
of religious utterances" holds good here: "Without shedding of blood
there is no remission of this sin."

And it is because I know that mothers will spend their heart's blood in
saving their sons, and because I believe that women, with their new-born
position and dignity, will not go on accepting as a matter of course
that their womanhood should be fashioned like the Egyptian sphinx, half
pure woman, crowned with intellectual and moral beauty, dowered with the
homage of men; and half unclean beast of prey, seeking whom it may slay,
outcast and abandoned and forced to snare or starve--it is because of
this, my rooted faith in women, that I have hope.

As long ago as 1880 Professor Max Mueller, ever anxious for the interests
of his Indian fellow-subjects, when Mr. Malabari came to ask him how he
could rouse English public opinion with regard to the injuries inflicted
on young girls by Hindu child-marriages, answered him at once, "Write a
short pamphlet and send it to the women of England. They begin to be a
power, and they have one splendid quality, they are never beaten."[44]
And if this can be said of English women, still more may it be said of
the women of America.

But, further, to strengthen us in this splendid quality, have we
sufficiently recognized the new moral forces that are coming into the
world? Have our eyes been opened to see "the horses and chariots of
fire" which are silently taking up their position around us, to guard
us and fight for us, that we may not be beaten; the deepened sense of
moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new
altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling
to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for
which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation
does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering
women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance,
and the loss of a single vote might wreck it--women, be it remembered,
who were working naked to the waist in the coal-mines, and little
children of eight or nine who were carrying half a sack of coals twelve
times a day the height of St. Paul's Cathedral--the Archbishop of
Canterbury and t