standard of the race to be finally planted, to move
forward no more, for ever:--that, if the parasite woman on her couch,
loaded with gewgaws, the plaything and amusement of man, be the
permanent and final manifestation of female human life on the globe,
then that couch is also the death-bed of human evolution. These profound
underlying truths, perhaps, not one woman in twenty thousand of those
actively engaged in the struggle for readjustment has so closely and
keenly grasped that she can readily throw them into the form of exact
language; and yet, probably, not the feeblest woman taking share in our
endeavour toward readjustment and expansion fails to be animated by a
vague but profound consciousness of their existence. Beyond the small
evils, which she seeks by her immediate, personal action to remedy, lie,
she feels; large ills of which they form but an off-shoot; beyond the
small good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great and
universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of today,
lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she alone
nor her sex alone are concerned, but all mankind.

That such should be the mental attitude of the average woman taking part
in the readjustive sexual movement of today; that so often on the public
platform and in literature adduces merely secondary arguments, and
is wholly unable logically to give an account of the great propelling
conditions behind it, is sometimes taken as an indication of the
inefficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of the movement in
which she takes part. But in truth, that is not so. It is rather
an indication which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in the
substance of human life, are the roots of this movement; and it places
it in a line with all those vast controlling movements which have in the
course of the ages reorganised human life.

For those great movements which have permanently modified the condition
of humanity have never taken their rise amid the chopped logic of
schools; they have never drawn their vitality from a series of purely
intellectual and abstract inductions. They have arisen always through
the action of widely spread material and spiritual conditions, creating
widespread human needs; which, pressing upon the isolated individuals,
awakens at last continuous, if often vague and uncertain, social
movement in a given direction. Mere intellectual comprehension may
guide, retard, or