In the lives of all nations there come moments when an idea, hitherto vaguely, almost unconsciously, held, assumes sculptured shape, and is manifestly felt to be of vital significance to a large, important, and steadily increasing section of the community. At such moments a spectre has begun to haunt the national house—a ghost which cannot be laid till it has received quietus. Such a ghost now infests our home. The full emancipation of women is an idea long vaguely held, but only in the last half-century formulated and pressed forward with real force and conviction, not only by women, but by men. Of this full emancipation of women, the political vote is assuredly not, as is rather commonly supposed in a land of party politics, the be-all and end-all; it is a symbol, whose practical importance—though considerable—is as nothing beside the fulfilment of the idea which it symbolizes. The Will to Power and the Will to Love have been held up, in turn, as the animating principles of the Universe; but these are, rather, correlative half-truths, whose rivalry is surely stilled and reconciled in a yet higher principle, the Will to Harmony, to Balance, to Equity—a supreme adjustment, or harmonising power, present wherever a man turns; by which, in fact, he is conditioned, for he can with his mental apparatus no more conceive of a Universe without a Will to Equity holding it together than he can conceive the opposite of the axiom, “Ex nihilo nihil fit.” There is assuredly no thought so staggering as that, if a blade of grass or the energy contained within a single emotion were—not transmuted—but _withdrawn entirely_ from the Universe, the balance would tip for ever and the Universe crumble in our imaginations to thin air.