ng, and discussing it: and one said
this, and another that. And all the while as they talked the bird sat
motionless, with its gaze fixed on the clear, blue sky above it. And one
said, "Suppose we let the creature loose to see what it will do?"--and
the bird shivered. But the others cried, "It is too valuable; it might
get lost. If it were to try to fly it might fall down and break its
neck." And the bird, with its foot chained to the log, sat looking
upward into the clear blue sky; the sky, in which it had never been--for
the bird--the bird, knew what it would do--because it was an eaglet!

There is one woman known to many of us, as each human creature knows but
one on earth; and it is upon our knowledge of that woman that we base
our certitude.

For those who do not know her, and have not this ground, it is probably
profitable and necessary that they painfully collect isolated facts and
then speculate upon them, and base whatever views they should form upon
these collections. It might even be profitable that they should form no
definite opinions at all, but wait till the ages of practical experience
have put doubt to rest. For those of us who have a ground of knowledge
which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to
act fearlessly than to argue.

Finally, it may be objected to the entrance of woman to the new fields
of labour, and in effect it is often said--"What, and if, all you have
sought be granted you--if it be fully agreed that woman's ancient fields
of toil are slipping from her, and that, if she do not find new,
she must fall into a state of sexual parasitism, dependent on her
reproductive functions alone; and granted, that, doing this, she must
degenerate, and that from her degeneration must arise the degeneration
and arrest of development of the males as well as of the females of her
race; and granting also, fully, that in the past woman has borne one
full half, and often more than one half, of the weight of the productive
labours of her societies, in addition to child-bearing; and allowing
more fully that she may be as well able to sustain her share in the
intellectual labours of the future as in the more mechanical labours of
the past; granting all this, may there not be one aspect of the question
left out of consideration which may reverse all conclusions as to the
desirability, and the human good to be attained by woman's enlarged
freedom and her entering into the new fields of