action for women will outlast its
temporary cause. Once so admitted to new fields of industrial, business
and professional activity, women can never be generally excluded from
them again. Thus when the soldiers become citizens, many of the women
will remain producers, working beside men under new conditions of
equality.

The result, with the general stimulation of radical thinking that the
War involves, will be a profound acceleration of the feminist movement
throughout, at least, the democracies of the world. Already it is being
recognized that all valid principles of democracy apply to women equally
with men. Regenerated, if chaotic, Russia takes for granted the farthest
reaches of feminism. The regime in England, that bitterly opposed
suffrage for women, is now voluntarily granting it before the close of
the War.

Thus the victory of the allied nations will mean the fruition of much of
the feminism that is a phase of humanism. It will mean freeing women
from outgrown custom and tradition, from unjust limitations in
industrial, social and political life. It will mean men and women
working together, on a plane of moral equality, with free initiative and
voluntary co-operation, for the fruition of democracy. Just as that
fruition will see the end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no
more women slaves or parasites, none regarded or possessed as property,
but only free human beings, each self-directed and self-controlled, and
responsible for his or her own personality and conduct.

XIV

THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY

The nineteenth century was the period of rapid growth in adhesion to
those ideals of democracy for which the War is being fought. It is not
so well recognized that during the same hundred years democracy was so
transformed as to be to-day a new thing under the sun.

Up to the time of the French and American revolutions democracy rested
largely upon certain abstract ideas of human nature. Rousseau could
argue that in primitive times men sat down together to form a state,
each giving up a part of his natural right to a central authority, and
thus justifying it. We now know that nothing of the kind ever happened,
that society had undergone a long process of development before men
began to think about it at all. We continue to repeat the splendid at
all. I refer, of course, to the women of antiquity. Where respectable,
these were the head of the household slaves, scarcely remove