t is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She
knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of
the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the
earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the
directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human
brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little
lives gain their peculiar grandeur.

And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the
smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and
grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there
is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's
domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is
taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on
behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that
strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and
relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
the Children of Woman."

And what of Miss Duncan--what is her part in the woman's movement? In
her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I
dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion
of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,'
and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of
the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.'
'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At
this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered
teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel--' 'But,' said the
lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel--' At this point I could
think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am
of little value and ought not to speak."

But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of
the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is
the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work,
so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which
we call play. Isad