direction. Mere intellectual comprehension may guide, retard, or
accelerate the great human movements; it has never created them. It may
even be questioned whether those very leaders, who have superficially
appeared to create and organise great and successful social movements, have
themselves, in most cases, perhaps in any, fully understood in all their
complexity the movements they themselves have appeared to rule. They have
been, rather, themselves permeated by the great common need; and being
possessed of more will, passion, intensity, or intellect, they have been
able to give voice to that which in others was dumb, and conscious
direction to that which in others was unconscious desire: they have been
but the foremost crest of a great wave of human necessity: they have not
themselves created the wave which bears themselves, and humanity, onwards.
The artificial social movements which have had their origin in the
arbitrary will of individuals, guided with however much determination and
reason, have of necessity proved ephemeral and abortive. An Alexander
might will to weld a Greece and an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve
to create of a diversified Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of
skill and determination they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing
that which they desired; but the constraining individual will being
withdrawn, the object of their toil has melted away, as the little heap of
damp sand gathered under the palm of a child's hand on the sea-shore, melts
away, scattered by the wind and washed out by the waves, the moment the
hand that shaped it is withdrawn; while the small, soft, indefinite, watery
fragment of jelly-fish lying beside it, though tossed hither and thither by
water and wind, yet retains its shape and grows, because its particles are
bound by an internal and organic force.

Our woman's movement resembles strongly, in this matter, the gigantic
religious and intellectual movement which for centuries convulsed the life
of Europe; and had, as its ultimate outcome, the final emancipation of the