The divine, artistic, harmonious creation of the human spirit in the divine, artistic, harmonious human body, this is the grand function of the feminine era. For this it is that woman has those special finer endowments which in all ages have distinguished her from man, and foreshown a higher life for her in some future--some Beulah, visible to eyes that could o'ershoot the bounds of the passing age. Wanting this power, preparing the day of its advent, John Baptist has toiled, sweated, groaned, fumed, devastated in his wilderness, to touch its hither border at last in this pregnant nineteenth century. Age of revolution--age of wonders!--of which the very greatest are, I think, the beginnings we already see of settlement here. As a question, that of woman is not an old one. There can be no Woman Question among any people till it is advanced enough to ask for better methods than man's. When this stage is reached, life is ripe for the advent of woman--it appeals to her to come forward. It prepares better conditions, that it may invite her--opens fields, that it may engage her powers--seeks to clothe her in a real dignity, of which she has before worn rather the semblance than itself. Society, obeying the higher view of her, enacts new laws for her enlargement, modifies or sets aside social canons which restricted and warped and suppressed her, and begins with these movements to find itself enriched by the presence of finer influences; led upward to more exalted standards, penetrated with a subtler humane sentiment than it before knew. Yet with all these movements in her favor, woman, bone of man's bone, remains a bone of contention to him, till nature, read truly and trusted reverently, is allowed to lead him as a little child by the hand and show him woman's real kingdom. He must not look on it with a timid or a grudging eye. A Chinese mandarin in California, becoming acquainted with the fact that American women could read and write and be trusted with accounts, replied, with a warning shake of the head, 'If he readee, writee, by and by he lickee all the men.' Does this apprehension possibly extend beyond the Celestial Empire? It will not be expressed, I know, but there is much unexpressed feeling which is none the less real for its silence.