A PIONEER OF THE MOVEMENT
THERE is no truer or more consolatory observation concerning the great movements of thought which change the social history of the world than that no individual is indispensable to their growth. The Reformation in England and Germany would have come and would have changed men's thoughts concerning the relations of man to God, and of the Church to society, if Wiclif and Erasmus and Luther had never lived, and if Henry VIII. had never wished to put away his first wife. The democratic movement, changing men's thoughts concerning the relations of the State to society, would have come even if the roll of famous and infamous names associated with the revolution in England and France had been a blank. And the change which nearly the whole of civilised society throughout the world is conscious of in its estimation of the duties, rights, occupations, and sphere of women in a like manner is not due to any individual or set of individuals. The vastness of the change, its appearance, almost simultaneously, in various ways in different parts of the world, indicate that it proceeds from causes too
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