THE ADVANCE OF WOMAN
Follow Light and do the Right—for man can half control his doom—
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb!
—Tennyson, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After.
Sixty years ago! To us of the present day it
seems a very long time—a kind of "dark ages"
period wherein we peer backward dubiously, wondering
what everybody was like then. History,
taking us by the hand, shows us, as in a magic
glass, the Coronation of Victoria, one of the
best Queens that the world has ever known, and
tells us of the great men and masterly intellects
of that past time, whose immortal works we still
have with us, but whose mere mortal place knows
them no more. Much may be seen in the backward
glimpse that some of us may possibly regret and wish
that we possessed again. Men of power and dominance,
for example—great writers, great thinkers,
great reformers—surely we lack these! Surely we
need them sorely! But it seems to be a rule of
Nature that if we gain in one direction we must
lose in another, and whatever we have lost in that
far-gone period, we have certainly gained much in
the forward direction. One of the most remarkable
changes, perhaps, that has taken place in the
