an say how great a
change might be made in the fair face of the earth if the effort to
remove the causes of poverty and of disease should become the serious
occupation of half mankind. In the lower stages of existence the
extermination of evil has been the work of a slow and gradual process.
Millions of individuals have been sacrificed in order to produce the few
who were fitted to their surroundings. But at last a creature has been
produced of so much intelligence that he is able to undertake his own
further development. He can speculate upon the causes of his failures in
the search for happiness, and he can apply remedies. It is true that
those remedies have often been productive of more harm than good, it is
true that it would be hard to calculate the evil effects of the English
poor-laws, for instance, but all the experiments that have hitherto
worked badly are but so much material from which to draw a knowledge of
better methods. When the Wlllimantic Thread Company has found a way to
make its girls come singing from their work as they go to it, and to
make better thread at the same time, no one can say that great changes
may not be brought about when once scientific methods shall have been
discovered for the extermination of disease and crime. What more
interesting field for investigation, for theory, for active work, can
women find than that large kind of charity which is to supersede in the
future the indiscriminate alms-giving of the past? The unselfishness
that is demanded by the life of a reformer they have already in large
abundance. There is no limit to the devotion which many women show their
families, but such devotion has in these days become so unnecessary as
to be little more than a higher form of selfishness. Perhaps it only
needs a leader to turn this store of energy into wider channels and to
make it subservient to larger ends. Perhaps the labor and patience and
self-renunciation that are necessary to the regeneration of the world
are to come from women. Such an absolute disregard of self as they are
capable of, if it were once allowed to overflow the narrow limits of the
home, might in no long time turn a goodly portion of the world into a
garden of roses. There are still men who wish to appropriate to
themselves all the high qualities of their women, but they belong to a
race that is destined to rapid extinction, and to most rapid extinction
in this country. That American men are more thoroughly chiv