It really seems as though it were time for woman, in general congress of the women’s clubs assembled, to make a reasonably full and clear statement of her aims and principles--a declaration of faith which shall give her own sex and men the opportunity to know precisely what she is driving at. Her progress for the last hundred years has been gratifying to the world, with the exception of pig-headed or narrow-minded men, and civilization has been inestimably benefitted by the broadening of her intelligence and her interests. But she has now reached a point where there is a parting of the ways, and the world would very much like to know which she intends to take. The atmosphere of the women’s clubs is mysterious but unsuggestive, and consequently many of us feel inclined to murmur with the poet, “it is clever, but we don’t know what it means.” Unrepressed nervous mental activity easily becomes social affectation or tomfoolery, in the absence of a controlling aim or purpose. To exhaust one’s vitality in papers or literary teas, merely to express or simulate individual culture or freedom, may not land one in an insane asylum, but it is about as valuable to society, as an educating force, as the revolutions of the handle of a freezer, when the crank is off, are valuable to the production of ice-cream. For the benefit of such a congress, if haply it should be called together later, it will not be out of place to offer a few suggestions as to her future evolution. In this connection it seems to me imperative to go back to the original poetic conception of woman as the wife and mother, the domestic helpmate and loving, self-abnegating companion of man. Unedifying as this formula of description may seem to the active-minded modern woman, it is obvious that under existing physiological conditions she must remain the wife and mother, even though she declines to continue domestic, loving, and self-abnegating. And side by side with physiological conditions stands the intangible, ineffable force of sexual love, the poetic, entrancing ecstasy which no scientist has yet been able to reduce to a myth or to explode. Schopenhauer, to be sure, would have us believe that it is merely a delusion by which nature seeks to reproduce herself, but even on this material basis the women’s clubs find themselves face to face with an enemy more determined than any Amazon. A maid deluded becomes the sorriest of club members.