“It is easy indeed, Manfreda, to criticize and you will admit that I have not sought to avoid your criticisms, though each one has been designed to force me to condemn my sex. Very well, I admit as you want me to do, that we lived in a chaotic state of society, that our ideals were for the most part materialistic, that our democracy was usually a complaisant indifference to the rule of plunderers, and that mediocrities led us rather than supermen. This is true. But it was also an age of liberation that produced a ferment of rebellion against traditions. We were not smugly contented but dared to question our gods. We applied a new searching scientific method to every relation in life. We were explorers, rebels. Because an idea was new, we wished to try it out even if we suffered for it. We men conquered the air and the depths of the sea, we dared to seek the riddles of life, of space and of eternity. We produced exceptional minds to do this. If in our political society, we lacked pre-eminent leaders, at least this is what we accomplished. We gave to the masses an opportunity to enjoy life, such as kings in the middle ages had never possessed. We no sooner invented, than we adapted the invention to the mass. What great emperor before the year 1820, ever lived in a palace, lighted by electricity, heated mechanically, was able to move at a hundred miles an hour, had the world’s journal brought before his eyes each day, and listened to great artists, great orchestras and famous men and women at great distances. Yet, that is what the age you call materialistic did for those who formerly would have lived in poverty and dirt, in unsanitary hovels, who used to eat meat once a week, if at all, never touched butter and were tied to the spot where they were born. Isn’t this to the credit of man?” Several of the council sprung up to respond, agitated by the heat of my defence but Manfreda silenced them and without departing from the philosophic calm of her even tone said: