accelerate the great human movements; it has never
created them. It may even be questioned whether those very leaders, who
have superficially appeared to create and organise great and successful
social movements, have themselves, in most cases, perhaps in any, fully
understood in all their complexity the movements they themselves have
appeared to rule. They have been, rather, themselves permeated by the
great common need; and being possessed of more will, passion, intensity,
or intellect, they have been able to give voice to that which in
others was dumb, and conscious direction to that which in others was
unconscious desire: they have been but the foremost crest of a great
wave of human necessity: they have not themselves created the wave which
bears themselves, and humanity, onwards. The artificial social movements
which have had their origin in the arbitrary will of individuals, guided
with however much determination and reason, have of necessity proved
ephemeral and abortive. An Alexander might will to weld a Greece and
an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversified
Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determination
they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which they
desired; but the constraining individual will being withdrawn, the
object of their toil has melted away, as the little heap of damp sand
gathered under the palm of a child's hand on the sea-shore, melts away,
scattered by the wind and washed out by the waves, the moment the hand
that shaped it is withdrawn; while the small, soft, indefinite, watery
fragment of jelly-fish lying beside it, though tossed hither and
thither by water and wind, yet retains its shape and grows, because its
particles are bound by an internal and organic force.

Our woman's movement resembles strongly, in this matter, the gigantic
religious and intellectual movement which for centuries convulsed the
life of Europe; and had, as its ultimate outcome, the final emancipation
of the human intellect and the freedom of the human spirit. Looked
back upon from the vantage-point of the present, this past presents the
appearance of one vast, steady, persistent movement proceeding always
in one ultimate direction, as though guided by some controlling human
intellect. But, to the mass of human individuals taking part in it, it
presented an appearance far otherwise. It was fought out, now here,
now there, by isolated individuals and sma