ain, Elizabeth of England, and
Catharine of Russia, women have not failed to grasp the large impersonal
aspects of life, and successfully and powerfully to control them, when
placed in the supreme position in which it was demanded. It may also
be stated, and is sometimes, with so much iteration as to become almost
wearisome, that women's adequacy in the modern fields of intellectual or
skilled manual labour is no more today an open matter for debate, than
the number of modern women who, as senior wranglers, doctors, &c.,
have already successfully entered the new fields, and the high standard
attained by women in all university examinations to which they are
admitted, and their universal success in the administration of parochial
matters, wherever they have been allowed to share it, proves their
intellectual and moral fitness for the new forms of labour.

All these statements are certainly interesting, and may be unanswerable.
And yet--if the truth be told, it is not ultimately on these grounds
that many of us base our hope and our certitude with regard to the
future of woman. Our conviction as to the plenitude of her powers for
the adequate performance of lofty labours in these new fields, springs
not at all from a categorical enumeration of the attainments or
performances of individual women or bodies of women in the past or
present; it has another source.

There was a bird's egg once, picked up by chance upon the ground, and
those who found it bore it home and placed it under a barn-door fowl.
And in time the chick bred out, and those who had found it chained it by
the leg to a log, lest it should stray and be lost. And by and by they
gathered round it, and speculated as to what the bird might be. One
said, "It is surely a waterfowl, a duck, or it may be a goose; if we
took it to the water it would swim and gabble." But another said, "It
has no webs to its feet; it is a barn-door fowl; should you let it loose
it will scratch and cackle with the others on the dung-heap." But a
third speculated, "Look now at its curved beak; no doubt it is a parrot,
and can crack nuts!" But a fourth said, "No, but look at its wings;
perhaps it is a bird of great flight." But several cried, "Nonsense!
No one has ever seen it fly! Why should it fly? Can you suppose that
a thing can do a thing which no one has ever seen it do?" And the
bird--the bird--with its leg chained close to the log, preened its wing.
So they sat about it, speculati