edifice of their civilization, which even now, story over story of wonderful achievement, towers almost to the skies. What wrought the change? Simply the impulse to better their condition and rise into something higher, and which was so strong upon men that, to accomplish it, they scrupled not at the greatest crimes. They enslaved the weaker wherever they found them, and forced them beyond their strength to produce, not only their own food, but that of their oppressors also. Liberated now from the Adamic bondage to the soil, they found time and strength to attempt an entrance into the world of thought, and from this division of labour, though in the first place so cruelly brought about, have come all the great conquests of the human mind,[1]—conquests which now react upon agriculture, and will continue to do so until the whole earth becomes like the garden of the Lord.
Perhaps the world would have learned in no other way than by brute force, but surely we can look back and see that if men could have voluntarily co-operated in their agriculture and their arts, all the dreadful suffering of the ages of slavery and serfdom might have been spared. The alternative is not presented to women. We cannot, even if we would, enslave each other, and let us thank God that we have always been kept from the temptations and the crimes which so generally go with power! Our temptation is a negative one, but I believe it scarcely less fatal to human happiness and virtue. It is to stand apart, and, rather than give the pre-eminence to those among us to whom it naturally belongs, to do nothing to help either ourselves or the race. Unlike men, we do not care to oppress, but we cannot bear to obey. We prefer a very narrow margin of wilful independence to a wide realm of freedom regulated by law, and are happier to reign each one supreme in the little corner some man allots to her, than to be secondary to any in the
- ↑ In the ancient world, it was among the aristocracies and the priesthood alone that science or culture had any existence. The Greeks themselves, though we think of them as a nation, were but some handfuls of free citizens set over a crowd of slaves.
