great multitude of their sex, along the paths of progress and achievement, as the superior minds among men have in every age, generation, and community swayed and influenced their fellows. The elevation of woman cannot be accomplished by men. The theory of her nature cannot be made out, the riddle of her destiny cannot be solved, by them. We must have leaders of like constitutions, passions, sympathies, with ourselves, to help us out of our difficulties, to express our aspirations, to embody our conceptions. For our peculiar feminine interests we need our own thinkers, our own teachers, our own doctors, legislators, editors, reformers, artists, and poets; while for those of humanity in general we require the study and conclusions of wise and cultured women as well as those of men, since the latter we have already, and they seem to be inadequate. I say we want all this from the unknown gifted ones of our sex; but we have not got it and cannot have it, because those who should be its prophets are chained like ourselves to the traditional feminine tread-mill, they and we alike grinding nothing but chaff, for the men have long since taken the grain away.
Where have they sown, that we may reap it again, and once more fill our empty granaries? What shall take the place to us of the round of productive industries we have lost, making the women of all classes as indispensably useful to the community as the men, removing our too well merited reproach of frivolity and extravagance, and giving us all something to live for beside the imitation of the last new fashion?
We shall find it when we forget the prejudices and conventionalities of many ages of suffering and oppression, and start once more from the primal instinct of humanity,—the Social Instinct,—that which first creates the family, and then draws men into the brotherhood of nations,—which out of isolated souls and bodies builds governments and churches and commerce, and elaborates science and the arts, and which alone contains the whole secret of masculine power and success. For what indeed is this great "world" we talk
