And if equality be the cry, let it be for equality of opportunity, of education, of service to the state, but not a petty insistence on equality of personal value which must ever be an illusion. There is nothing so deleterious to manners as self-assertiveness, and if it is necessary for citizens of the New Jerusalem to assert daily and with vehemence in the market place that they are as good as any of the other citizens, there will be at least one quality in which it will be inferior to the older foundation. Let me plead with the women of England not so to misuse the name of a great ideal, as it has been misused before: they will not by so doing redress the wrongs of inequality. If they are supremely conscious of their worth, let them at least preserve the urbanity of the truly great who assert no claim but act upon the easy assumption of its general recognition. But it would be better if they could emulate the humility of the truly wise who, measuring themselves humbly by their ideals, find no delight in standing on tip-toe among their fellow mortals. Equality of achievement or capacity is beyond human powers to secure, and of what value are more formal equalities when grand eminences of wisdom and bursting torrents of energy put to shame the less exalted hillocks and narrower streams of the average human landscape? To serve with dignity is a greater claim to honour than to be served with deference. This is a hard lesson for those emerging from ill-devised trammels: they can only learn it slowly when they have become accustomed to their freedom. The good Englishwoman will more readily learn it than the man, for it will be proved to her in the primeval claims which men and children make on her devotion. Let her harry overweening man as much as she will, shaking her broom in his face, compelling him to call her in to reinforce his weakness and striving victoriously for equality with him in every service to the community; but only at her peril will she cast aside permanently her good manners as despicable relics of older restraints and seclusions. They are the natural flower of her good comradeship and motherliness: why should she stunt the growth from those two roots which are fixed ineradicably in the deepest fibres of her nature? CHAPTER VIII THE ENGLISHWOMAN AND THE ARTS