you did not do it I would drown her myself." But neither threats nor fear turned her from a purpose which she was unable to resist and two of her brothers went with her. Had she consulted her own will, "assuredly," she said, "I would far rather be spinning beside my poor mother, for this other is not my condition; but I must go and do the work because my Lord wills that I should do it."

She raised the siege of Orleans and had the king crowned at the very moment when France had given up all hope and was about to become a province of England. And what was the result? After making her path one of difficulties and in the end preventing her full success, her own country, which she had been the means of delivering, after subjecting her to a long imprisonment, handed her over to the inquisitors who, after a trial of five months, during a part of which time she was kept in an iron cage, and afterwards in a dark room in a tower of a castle with her feet in irons, which were fastened by a chain to a piece of wood, and watched over day and night by several soldiers of low degree, she was finally handed over to the English, who burnt her as a witch in the market place of Rouen. Thus man has ever abused her whose maternal instinct has brooded over the earth and world, and had it been free would have lit up many a dark path and loosened chains.

IX

A LAST WORD

THE twentieth century of the Christian era is, unless all signs are false, going to be women's century. All over the western world even as far towards the Orient as Turkey, yea, even in the Orient itself women are, as of one accord, gathering their forces to fight the great but bloodless battle of Armageddon, for the right to take their place in the world and to unite their endowments to those of man for the benefit of the race. Spasmodically, here and there, they have asked before and have been silenced, and there are prophets among men who prophesy that this movement will go the way of the others. But the gift of prophecy is as rare as all other good gifts while the false and particularly the superficial prophets are to be found on every corner, and Christ warned the world against false prophets: "Many shall come in my name." These superficial would-be leaders, who say that the home is woman's place and that by an inherent law of nature she cannot rise above it, do not because they could not explain how she has accomplished her present status with all the forces of organised society, religion, laws, institution, prejudices, and the vast body of her own inert sex opposed to her.

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The present movement has all the ear-marks of success. It differs from all its predecessors in that, without concerted action to begin with, it is unanimous in every land and that the best women, the sincere, earnest, intellectual, and the real lovers of humanity are behind it. It differs too, in that concerted action did not take place till women felt that they had fitted themselves by taking advantage of all the opportunities that were open to them to improve themselves, and by forcing others to open that were denied to them they realised their strength and moved on to greater and greater strength till at last there is no avenue in life where their influence is not a deciding factor. Thus they have realised and attained that faith which bids yonder mountain of prejudice to remove "and be cast into the sea." The cry that has delayed their progress beyond all others is the man cry of "Unwomanly" and "Unfeminine, and women are timid by long inheritance, and accustomed to look at themselves only through the eyes of men. The real spirit that animates the movement is drowned in the noise of the louder cry which, too often, like "the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind," has nothing to stand on except the unaccustomed.

To be womanly and feminine from the masculine point of view is to be flexible, yielding, amiable,

sweet in temperament which means to be weak in character, to have no strong opinions, none certainly that do not defer to man's, to be clay in his hands that can be moulded, to give him tenderness and affection but no opposition, to be clinging like a tendril and by no means to suggest vigorous health, for the lover likes to feel that the girl upon whom he bestows his affection has to lean on him and needs his strong arm, though the husband may see it from a different angle when it means doctor's bills, nurses, sickly children and an ill-regulated home.

But this was not the woman of the matriarchate who brought the human family so far on its course and formed and held society together with the bonds of fraternity, equality and liberty; this was not the Roman matron, the mothers of those stern men who conquered and governed the world for centuries; nor the Spartan mothers who would look on a coward son with horror and shame; nor the early Athenian mothers who made the golden age possible; nor Queen Elizabeth, who resisted every effort of her minister to involve her people in war, when she knew that the health of the country needed peace; nor Queen Victoria who, by her uncompromising attitude raised the moral well-being of every western land. No weakness in ruling has ever been associated with that noble woman, for, again and again, she over

ruled her advisers and saved the country from pitfalls and dangers into which they would have led it. God's woman was firm, strong, resisting evil, not with the sword, but in the strength of right-doing. Many a brilliant man has paid a terrific penalty for marrying his ideal "womanly woman," and his "grey hairs have been brought with sorrow to the grave," because he had not a son who inherited his qualities or who rose above the mediocre, for it is a matter of common observation that brilliant men are almost invariably the sons of strong-minded, capable mothers, irrespective of what their fathers were. Thus does nature protect her elect-woman,

The care of the race is woman's business, but the care does not consist as man says it does in bringing them into the world, nursing and clothing them till they are able to do it themselves. The care of the race begins with conception and ends only with the grave, nay, it begins with selection, for a debauched, diseased man is not fit to be husband and father but is the cause of a large proportion of the sickness in life and of early deaths. The human male is the only one who selects his mate and he has amply testified to his incapacity to do it for it is a well recognised fact that under his selection the race has deteriorated. The care of the race means the food, the clothes, the schools, the social system, the political