readjustment has so closely and keenly grasped that she can readily throw
them into the form of exact language; and yet, probably, not the feeblest
woman taking share in our endeavour toward readjustment and expansion fails
to be animated by a vague but profound consciousness of their existence.
Beyond the small evils, which she seeks by her immediate, personal action
to remedy, lie, she feels; large ills of which they form but an off-shoot;
beyond the small good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a
great and universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of
today, lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she
alone nor her sex alone are concerned, but all mankind.

That such should be the mental attitude of the average woman taking part in
the readjustive sexual movement of today; that so often on the public
platform and in literature adduces merely secondary arguments, and is
wholly unable logically to give an account of the great propelling
conditions behind it, is sometimes taken as an indication of the
inefficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of the movement in which
she takes part. But in truth, that is not so. It is rather an indication
which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in the substance of human
life, are the roots of this movement; and it places it in a line with all
those vast controlling movements which have in the course of the ages
reorganised human life.

For those great movements which have permanently modified the condition of
humanity have never taken their rise amid the chopped logic of schools;
they have never drawn their vitality from a series of purely intellectual
and abstract inductions. They have arisen always through the action of
widely spread material and spiritual conditions, creating widespread human
needs; which, pressing upon the isolated individuals, awakens at last
continuous, if often vague and uncertain, social movement in a given