of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she
knocks.

To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shaded
eyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of the
shadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems of so
gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a condition of
human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall exist
between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our old Northern
ancestors 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