set all human beings free not only to share in this conception but to realize it--to establish upon earth that ideal life of man which, in the words of George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he shall one day come to know it.” IV The whole point of the foregoing, for present purposes, is this: It is impossible for a sex or a class to have economic freedom until everybody has it, and until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody. Without economic freedom, efforts after political and social freedom are nugatory and illusive, except for what educational value they may have for those concerned with them. The women of the United States, having now got about all that is to be had out of these efforts--enough at any rate, to raise an uneasy suspicion that their ends are lamentably far from final--are in a peculiarly good position to discern the nature of real freedom, to see which way it lies, and to feel an ardent interest in what it can do for them. My purpose, then, is not deliberately to discourage their prosecution of any enfranchising measures that may lie in their way to promote, and still less to disparage the successes that they have already attained. It is rather to invite them thoughtfully to take stock of what they have really got by these successes, to consider whether it is all they want, and to settle with themselves whether their collective experience on the way up from the status of a subject sex does not point them to a higher ideal of freedom than any they have hitherto entertained. In the past century, women have gained a great deal in the way of educational, social and political rights. They have gained a fair degree of economic independence. They are no longer obliged to “keep silence in the churches,” as they still were at the beginning of the nineteenth century; indeed, certain sects have even admitted them to the ministry. The women who now enjoy this comparative freedom, and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are indebted to a long line of women who carried on the struggle--sometimes lonely and discouraging--against political, legal, social and industrial discrimination, and to the men, as well, who aided and encouraged them. Thanks to the efforts of these pioneers, the women of today have a new tradition to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those which women were expected to observe in the past: the tradition of active demand for the establishment of freedom. They will be none the less under obligation to continue this demand when the freedom that shall remain to be secured is of a kind not envisaged by their predecessors. Rather, in the measure that they proceed beyond those ends that seemed ultimate to their predecessors, they will prove that these built well; for the best earnest of advancement is the attainment of an ever new and wider vision of progress.