The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled the mediæval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such as _The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore_. She was growing significant in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about 1850 she turned into the "perfect lady" who kept an album bound in morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already the Brontës and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to the House of Commons. To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service. She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless, more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman than by man, simply because that as a sex he is in power, and the people who are in power never want to alter anything.