Nevertheless, on the whole, peace and contentment reigned; for advanced knowledge, not only taught the inutility, gross inhumanity, and waste of war, but science had made such wonderful progress in the arts of warfare throughout the whole world, that a battle actually meant the complete annihilation of both sides; thus a victory for either became an impossibility. Along with this enforced peace-keeping the wave of civilisation had spread everywhere carrying its mind-culture, its arts, and handicrafts to the uttermost parts of the earth; until the world had become a huge beehive of active industry, although not necessarily a severe muscle-wearing one. Through all the generations dating from the close of the nineteenth century the social question relative to the status of woman had been ever uppermost, having been kept to the front by the intense longing of the sex for a wider walk of life, a more extended field of action. They demanded a great reformation, a complete recast of social economics. The leading features of their programme being a higher education, which should be recognised by the Universities, Law, and Medical Corporations, in order that more honourable, lucrative, and responsible employments might be opened to them. They demanded also, political, social, and marital equality between the sexes; for they averred that women were being cramped and crippled by old-time conventionalities, the outcome of the customs and prejudices of mediæval ignorance and tyranny, which had invariably relegated their sex to a lower platform of liberty. As citizens it placed them in the position of minors and lunatics, they averred, and as wives it gave them but little more authority than what their children possessed from a legal point of view, however talented and cultivated they might be. Loud and bitter were the railings of the dominant sex against the movement. Men scoffed and derided ‘the new woman,’ as they mockingly termed her. She became the subject of epigram, pun, and pleasantry generally; the butt of every shallow humorist, and dubbed ‘the new darn on the old bluestocking,’ whatever that might mean. She was told that her aspirations were bold and offensive in the extreme; that they ‘unsexed’ her. Nor was she spared by her own sex. If a lady novelist had the courage to make a stand for social purity the critics would pounce upon her, condemning her work as ‘improper.’ Mostly those following this calling were males; but there were to be found feminine monstrosities among writers, who to curry favour with the multitude, stooped to the unworthiness of writing down those devoted champions of liberty for their own sex. It was a long battle and a hard, this struggle for equality. Man’s dominance and woman’s subjugation had not been a healthy influence throughout the ages, for either sex.