there is to begin again to-day at the heart of things and make
that right; upon the evident fact that this can be done none too
soon or earnestly, if the community and the country are not to
keep on in the broad way to a threatened destruction; and upon the
certainty that it can never be done unless it is done by woman,
and with all of woman's might. Not by struggles for new and
different place, but by the better, more loving, more intelligent,
deep-seeing, and deep-feeling filling of her own place, that none
will dispute and none can take from her. We are not where woman
was in the old brutal days that are so often quoted; and we shall
not, need not, return to that. Christianity has disposed of that
sort of argument. We are on a vantage ground for the doing of our
real, essential work better than it has been done ever before in
the history of the world; and we are madly leaving our work and
our vantage together.

The great step made by woman was in the generation preceding this
one of restlessness--the restlessness that has come through the
first feeling of great power. It was made in the time when women
learned physiology, that they might rear and nurse their families
and help their neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they
might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of
knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political
history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their
brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as
the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles,
that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work
with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners. The good work was
begun in the schools where girls were first told, as George B.
Emerson used to tell us Boston girls, that we were learning