itself as a passionate and sometimes noisy struggle for liberty of personal
action; while in another it is being fought out silently in the depth of
the individual consciousness--that primal battle-ground, in which all
questions of reform and human advance must ultimately be fought and
decided;--all this diversity, and the fact that the average woman is
entirely concerned in labour in her own little field, shows, not the
weakness, but the strength of the movement; which, taken as a whole, is a
movement steady and persistent in one direction, the direction of increased
activity and culture, and towards the negation of all possibility of
parasitism in the human female. Slowly, and unconsciously, as the child is
shaped in the womb, this movement shapes itself in the bosom of our time,
taking its place beside those vast human developments, of which men, noting
their spontaneity and the co-ordination of their parts, have said, in the
phraseology of old days, "This thing is not of man, but of God."

He who today looks at some great Gothic cathedral in its final form, seems
to be looking at that which might have been the incarnation of the dream of
some single soul of genius. But in truth, its origin was far otherwise.
Ages elapsed from the time the first rough stone was laid as a foundation
till the last spire and pinnacle were shaped, and the hand which laid the
foundation-stone was never the same as that which set the last stone upon
the coping. Generations often succeeded one another, labouring at
gargoyle, rose-window, and shaft, and died, leaving the work to others; the
master-builder who drew up the first rough outline passed away, and was
succeeded by others, and the details of the work as completed bore
sometimes but faint resemblance to the work as he devised it; no man fully
understood all that others had done or were doing, but each laboured in his
place; and the work as completed had unity; it expressed not the desire and
necessity of one mind, but of the human spirit of that age; and not less
essential to the existence of the building was the labour of the workman