be developed to a higher condition. Those at present in possession are challenged by women as by working men, when they assert that they fully secure the interests of the unrepresented and direct their forces satisfactorily. And it may not be they, contented as they are with their power and with themselves, but the discontented that we should listen to, if higher conditions are to be attained. To these general considerations must be added, in the case of the smaller nations, this: that the more alive and thoroughly active the whole social body is, the more power of resistance it will possess in the struggle for its existence. Those nations, in which every person can protect his own interests in and with those of the community, will—other conditions being equal—surpass the others, as an army of athletes would overcome one of invalids. Society is confronted by tasks of increasing complexity. A force hitherto unused, that of woman, now become socially conscious, offers its co-operation in dealing with them. All thinking persons desire new conditions with growing earnestness. But new conditions do not arise, as the socialist is far too willing to believe, through new external relations alone; nor through new ideas and discoveries, as the man of science with his bias is too apt to think. New conditions arise above all through new human beings, new souls, new emotions. Only these form new plans of life, new modes of action; only these revalue the objects which are then pursued day by day by innumerable individuals. A new idea becomes feeling and motive power, at first with one individual, then with a few, then with many, and finally with all. He who has been able to witness this with regard to any particular idea, knows that it comes about as in the spring, when first a solitary birch-tree on the sunny side unfolds its golden-green banner: then the veil of yellow, reddish-brown, and green is drawn closer and closer over the grey, till finally all the tree-tops are rounded and full, all colours subdued to one shade, and one scarcely remembers what it was like in the play of shifting colours, when the wild cherry gleamed white among the green, the dandelions spread themselves in wild profusion among the grass, the lilies of the valley peeped out from the sheath of their leaves, and the cuckoo called in the summer. Emotions are the sap which rises when the human landscape thus changes colour and form. Therefore no profound spiritual transformation has ever taken place unless women have taken part in it. It is upon this great power of woman, already indirectly effective, that we may with reason base the hope of her direct exertion of force becoming even more effective—if with it she preserves her womanly character.