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the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness
cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.

"I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach
better housekeeping to the whole world.

"I know I could if I would. But----

"I'm thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home
duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more
livable world life. Will they? I can't say. But I will say this:

"Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will
decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure
of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must
sanctify it or perish by it.

"Leisure! Culture! Emancipation! All nothing unless there is something
more. Culture without action is an ingrowing disease which first
debilitates and then dissolves the will to live. Emancipation without
duty is a mirage of pleasure which raises thirst but never quenches
it. The Romans emancipated their women, in the days of their
degeneration, but with no result except a completer collapse of family
life and of personal virtue.

"But perhaps there will be a new issue of events this time. It looks
as if there might be.

"That weary ancient world, recoiling from its luxuries, its
dissipations, its surfeits, turned to pessimistic mysticism, to the
theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh are vile, to
monastic withdrawal into the desert and the mountains, to the life of
inward searchings.

"This modern world is turning to optimistic materialism, to the theory
that the flesh and the things of the flesh can be made noble, to
anti-tuberculosis societies and juvenile courts, to the life of
outward workings.

"_That_ world found peace in _renunciation_. _This_ world seeks peace
in _service_.

"It is going to be an era of the importance, the utility, and the
possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. It is going
to be an era of Right Living.

"Will not woman have a _particular_ part in it? May she not even have
a _dominant_ part in it?

"I have watched her every hour from the beginning--from the very first
beginning of any life that had any warmth of love in it. I have seen
her make the hearth the symbol of the stability of the individual
life. Now, when the duties of the home, the stones of which that
hearth was made, are scattered far and wide, shall I not see her
reassemble t