The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us.
The amazement of that Chinese visitor in Boston, the other day, when he saw
a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English
visitors when young ladies teach classes in geometry and Latin, in our high
schools; the surprise of foreigners at seeing the rough throng in the
Cooper Institute reading-room submit to the sway of one young woman with a
crochet-needle--all these simply testify to the fact that the stakes have
moved. That they have yet been carried halfway to the end, who knows?

What a step from the horrible nuptials of those savage days to the poetic
marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett--the "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" on one side, the "One Word More" on the other! But who can say
that the whole relation between man and woman reached its climax there, and
that where the past has brought changes so vast the future is to add
nothing? Who knows that, when "the world's great bridals come," people may
not look back with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Perhaps even
Elizabeth Barrett promised to obey!

At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability of
another. Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from the
savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, there is a step forward. One
more step in the spiral line of progress has brought us to the unveiled
face and comparatively free movements of the English or American woman.
From the kitchen to the public lecture-room, from that to the
lecture-platform, and from that again to the ballot-box,--these are far
slighter steps than those which gradually lifted the savage girl of Sir
John Lubbock's picture into the possession of the alphabet and the dignity
of a home. So easy are these future changes beside those of the past, that
to doubt their possibility is as if Agassiz, after tracing year by year the