reflected down from her now triumphing far-off spirit, and I resolved to remember the woe and earthly wreck of her thwarted nature, and never to cease until I saw some better way for women than this which can so horribly waste and abuse their finest powers.
The bad Economy of our present Feminine Standard.
Apart from the individual suffering it occasions, the question arises, Can we as a sex afford to make mere seamstresses or housewives or parlour ornaments of these highly gifted women that occasionally appear among us? Is it the individual or the multitude that makes discoveries? It is the favourite American lie,—but I think as dangerous a one as ever was believed, and quite the most basely ungrateful,—that the great multitude, which, after a scanty education, is obliged to toil daily to the limits of its physical strength in procuring or preparing the necessaries of life, is yet able to go, by virtue of some inscrutable wisdom innate in itself, along the path of progress toward perfection. On the contrary, it is the daring intellectual energy and moral courage of the strong and mighty few that have pulled the sluggish world even as far as it has got out of its inborn vice and stupidity; and the most that the multitude can ever do, far more than it often has done, is to know a worthy leader when it sees him, and to follow his teaching. This explains why in barbarous countries, where men all follow the same occupations,—devoting themselves to supplying their bodily wants merely, and fighting their enemies,—society never advances. Simply it has no class of educated thinkers, of persons superior to the rest in knowledge, and therefore in judgment and mental power, to go before the community and point it to a new advance. Even among intellectually active nations, if despotism or superstition succeed in saying to the human spirit, "thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," a torpor and a stagnation as of winter's frost settles down upon it, and it remains immovable for centuries.
