tors shall find its realisation in a concrete reality,
and the Walkurie and her hero feast together at one board, in a brave
fellowship.

Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close the
door of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for the
body and soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that encloses
artificially the activity of woman and divides her from man; always we
picture the love of the sexes, as, once a dull, slow, creeping worm;
then a torpid, earthy chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect,
glorious in the sunshine of the future.

Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it only a blindness
in our eyes, which have been too long strained, which makes us see, far
up the river where it fades into the distance, through all the mists
that rise from the river-banks, a clear, a golden light? Is it only a
delusion of the eyes which makes us grasp our oars more lightly and bend
our backs lower; though we know well that long before the boat reaches
those stretches, other hands than ours will man the oars and guide its
helm? Is it all a dream?

The ancient Chaldean seer had a vision of a Garden of Eden which lay in
a remote past. It was dreamed that man and woman once lived in joy and
fellowship, till woman ate of the tree of knowledge and gave to man to
eat; and that both were driven forth to wander, to toil in bitterness;
because they had eaten of the fruit.

We also have our dream of a Garden: but it lies in a distant future. We
dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man,
and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil
and labour, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any
the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labour and made
beautiful by their own fellowship.

In his apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth;
we see a new earth; but therein dwells love--the love of comrades and
co-workers.

It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the
future; so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive
acquiescence in the present, that today we are found everywhere raising
our strange new cry--"Labour and the training that fits us for labour!"

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman and Labour, by Olive Schreiner

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