democracies, mother, father, master, friend, the tragedy of the unfulfilled life—the unsatisfied aspiration-which, to-day, looks out at us pitifully from many a woman's face, will pass away. Ruskin says somewhere in his vigorous way that there is no murder comparable in iniquity to the waste of a man's life—to the putting of him to ignoble uses. For centuries this waste of women's lives has been going on; and the momentous part of the present situation is that women themselves are beginning to see this. Women have been proving lately that they possess the gift of courage-moral and physical-in a remarkable degree. I have a theory that, mind moulding body, we shall see, in the near future, an immense improvement in the physique of our women. So far as I have been able to read the history of life on our planet, I see no reason, in the natural order of things, why women should be physically inferior to men. Free from cramping convention in dress and life-habits, educated liberally in the true, not the party sense of the word, having honourable, useful and happy careers open to them, they will be not only nobler in mind and character, but finer, stronger, healthier in body. And there are already notable signs that such a change is approaching.
It has been said of women that they cannot combine, that they are incapable of true loyalty one for the other. I think it must have been in the prophetic spirit of those who see with apprehension the passing away of their dear old world of prejudice, yes, and of sex domination, that this
