Following on nature’s rough division of the race, nature and civilisation in conjunction have produced a finer one, that of creator on the one side and material on the other. Next to being one’s self a creator, it is a great thing to be worthy material in a creator’s hand. And enhancement of culture in a spiritual as well as a material sense is brought about by the creators’ success in dealing with their material. When that material is human, this means that the creators—or leaders—are successful in converting the rest into real collaborators with will and judgment of their own. Flocks driven on by shepherds, or masses of humanity led by one no more remarkable than themselves, have never had lasting effects on the course of civilisation. Such effects only follow when a creator fires the multitude with the enthusiasm of new aims, or teaches them to ennoble the means by which they may attain ends worthy of aspiration. Thus, if women are to give the development of society a direction wholly different from that which man has given it, this will depend on the appearance among women of leaders who shall point the way to higher aims and employ purer means. But what gives us reason to expect this of women? The reason cannot be sought elsewhere than within the sphere of their own creations, love, motherliness, the home, domestic economy. If it can be shown that women have brought all these to the full perfection of which they are capable, then there will really be good reason to believe in their miraculous power in the organisation of society. But even if we fully admit the hindrances which man’s ordering of society, his legislation, his nature have placed in the way of women—is there a single thoughtful woman who can maintain that she herself, or that women in general, have nevertheless done all that they could within their own special sphere; that they have used to the utmost the opportunities they have possessed? What conscientious woman does not perceive that the majority still bungle the great discoveries of their sex, by the way in which they act as guardians and educators of children, as lovers, wives, makers of homes, housekeepers! In every department they lack art and science, clearness of view and circumspection. Frequently they do not possess the first conditions for intensifying and refining a happy love; that of bearing and bringing up worthy children; that of attaining the greatest sum of material comfort for the members of the family with the least expenditure of force and of means; that of arranging the spiritual balance-sheet so that the highest possible enhancement of life will be the net profit. Exactly as the majority of men only slowly and partially receive and transmit the thoughts, the works of beauty, the discoveries that their leaders bring them, so also do women slowly and partially receive the leading ideas in their sphere.