The past is burnt out, with a residue of but little value except as a warning. The future is not ours, but of the universe with its hidden and irrevocable destiny. The present belongs to us, and it is our creed to be happy in its possession. We could have sown fears as you have, and could have been as overwhelmed with their multiplied terrors. We could have invented a circumstantial paradise like yours, with its pathway of extinguished temporal hopes, and its discouragements of the noblest ambitions to build out of the materials in sight; but to what purpose except an unworthy one? The present is ours. Our field is among the living things which surround us. The most of life to us is its possibilities of happiness, and the opportunities it affords for the enjoyment of our religious impulses to serve the Deity in advancing ourselves and our society toward that state of perfection to which under the supreme intelligence all things are seen to tend. CHAPTER XII. A notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which existed in your primary state. It is not surprising that in your present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out for you by the divine law of evolution in thought. We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of those restrictions which hold them in subjection; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to banish them than your men.