This means accordingly, we submit, that those of us who at the present hour “feel the change,” as the phrase is, in the computation of the feminine range, with the fullest sense of what it may portend, shirk at once our opportunity and our obligation in not squeezing for its last drop of testimony such an exceptional body of illustration as we here possess. It has so much to say to any view—whether, in the light of old conventions, the brightest or the darkest—of what may either glitter or gloom in a conquest of every license by our contemporaries of the contending sex, that we scarce strain a point in judging it a provision of the watchful fates for this particular purpose and profit: its answers are so full to most of our uncertainties. It is to be noted of course that the creator of Lélia and of Mauprat was on the one hand a woman of an extraordinary gift and on the other a woman resignedly and triumphantly voteless—doing without that boon so beautifully, for free development and the acquisition and application of “rights,” that we seem to see her sardonically smile, before our present tumults, as at a rumpus about nothing; as if women need set such preposterous machinery in motion for obtaining things which she had found it of the first facility, right and left, to stretch forth her hand and take. There it is that her precedent stands out—apparently to a blind generation; so that some little insistence on the method of her appropriations would seem to be peculiarly in place. It was a method that may be summed up indeed in a fairly simple, if comprehensive, statement: it consisted in her dealing with life exactly as if she had been a man—exactly not being too much to say. Nature certainly had contributed on her behalf to this success; it had given her a constitution and a temperament, the kind of health, the kind of mind, the kind of courage, that might most directly help—so that she had but to convert these strong matters into the kind of experience. The writer of these lines remembers how a distinguished and intimate friend of her later years, who was a very great admirer, said of her to him just after her death that her not having been born a man seemed, when one knew her, but an awkward accident: she had been to all intents and purposes so fine and frank a specimen of the sex. This anomalous native turn, it may be urged, can have no general application—women cannot be men by the mere trying or by calling themselves “as good”; they must have been provided with what we have just noted as the outfit. The force of George Sand’s exhibition consorts, we contend, none the less perfectly with the logic of the consummation awaiting us, if a multitude of signs are to be trusted, in a more or less near future: that effective repudiation of the _distinctive_, as to function and opportunity, as to working and playing activity, for which the definite removal of immemorial disabilities is but another name.