of the hitherto unsolved problem of
making country life as attractive to the masses as that of the towns
and cities. As time goes on the effect of education must tell, and the
generations that are to come will be more enlightened and more
altruistic, and the tendency of the world will be more and more, even
as it is now, towards higher and nobler conceptions of human happiness.
I have lived through a glorious age of progress. Born in "the wonderful
century," I have watched the growth of the movement for the uplifting
of the masses, from the Reform Bill of 1832 to the demands for adult
suffrage. As a member of a church which allows women to speak in the
pulpit, a citizen of a State which gives womanhood a vote for the
Assembly, a citizen of a Commonwealth which fully enfranchises me for
both Senate and Representatives, and a member of a community which was
foremost in conferring University degrees on women, I have benefited
from the advancement of the educational and political status of women
for which the Victorian era will probably stand unrivalled in the
annals of the world's history. I have lived through the period of
repressed childhood, and witnessed the dawn of a new era which has made
the dwellers in youth's "golden age" the most important factor in human
development. I have watched the growth of Adelaide from the condition
of a scattered hamlet to that of one of the finest cities in the
southern hemisphere; I have seen the evolution of South Australia from
a province to an important State in a great Commonwealth. All through
my life I have tried to live up to the best that was in me, and I
should like to be remembered as one who never swerved in her efforts to
do her duty alike to herself and her fellow-citizens. Mistakes I have
made, as all are liable to do, but I have done my best. And when life
has closed for me, let those who knew me best speak and think of me as
One who never turned her back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
No nobler epitaph would I desire.

End of Project Gutenberg's An Autobiography, by Catherine Helen Spence

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