The twenty-six years have not been lost, however, even in regard to Women’s Suffrage. Meanwhile have been growing up young men and young women, educated under the broadening effect of more equal privileges in learning. The old restrictions seem to them meaningless in the new light of reason. A generous youth, in the older Universities, who has been beaten by a woman in a mathematical examination, feels his brow flush when he receives the reward that is denied to her, and feels shame instead of pride that he has to be protected against her competition. He would never dream of suggesting that she would “require an improved understanding to vote for a Parliament man.” In the youth of the country lies hope, if the youth be but trained aright. The result of the educational opportunities has been to give women personal capability of entering professional life. But the Professions have certain powers of excluding competitors, and they have all done what they could to make entrance difficult or impossible. Women are now admitted to the Medical Profession. Several original professions they have invented for themselves, and they have done their best with the old. They have therefore gained new powers of acquiring property. Their energy and self-dependence have revolutionised the thoughts of men as regards their capability. John Stuart Mill, in his “Subjection of Women,” p. 99, says: “If anything conclusive can be inferred from experience, without psychological analysis, it would be that the things women have not been allowed to do are just those that they succeed best in doing.” Association of ideas is doing its work in forming customs and in moulding habits of thought. No longer is a woman an incongruous sight in Halls of Learning or of Research, in Scientific Societies or on Boards of Guardians. Those who exclude women are learning that they themselves suffer by the exclusion. They welcome them eagerly as Canvassers at elections. Ere long they will find it both natural and desirable to invite them to co-operate with them through the Ballot-box, “to choose a Knight of the Shire or a Burgess from a Borough, in the stead of all and of each of them, to go to the Parliament House, and there consulting with the Knights of other Shires,” to defend the interests of _those who sent them_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX. OTHER WOMEN. “All sisters are _co-parceners_ one with another. The elder-born has no privilege over the younger.”