whether the right or left ventricle of his heart works most satisfactorily,
or is most essential to his well-being, so both be perfect in health and
activity; as no sane woman distresses herself lest her right breast should
not excel the left in beauty and use; so no sane man or woman questions
anxiously over the relative perfections of male and female. In love there
is no first nor last. What we request of life is that the tools should be
given to his hand or hers who can best handle them; that the least
efficient should not be forced into the place of the more efficient, and
that an artificially drawn line should never repress the activities of the
individual creature, which we as women bring into the world.

But it may also be said to us, "What, and if, all your dreams and hopes for
woman and the future of the race be based on air? What, and if, desirable
as it is that woman should not become practically dependent on her sexual
function alone, and should play at least as great a part in the productive
labour of the race in the future as she played in that of the past - what,
if woman cannot take the same vast share in the complex and largely mental
labour fields of the future, as in the largely physical fields of the past?
What, and if, in spite of all her effort and sacrifice to attain this end,
exactly now and when the labour of civilised societies becomes mental
rather than mechanical, woman be found wanting?"

In Swiss valleys today the traveller comes sometimes on the figure of a
solitary woman climbing the mountain-side, on her broad shoulders a mighty
burden of fodder or manure she is bearing up for the cattle, or to some
patch of cultivated land. Steady, unshrinking eyes look out at you from
beneath the deeply seamed forehead, and a strand of hair, perhaps almost as
white as the mountain snows on the peaks above, escapes from under the edge
of the binding handkerchief. The face is seamed and seared with the stern
marks of toil and endurance, as the mountain-side is with marks of storm