There is one very serious result of our refusal to honour those to whom honour is due. The task of raising and training healthy and capable people to the work of the world and the service of God, and--as the orthodox believe--in the very likeness of God, is surely not the least noble task to which human beings can devote themselves. And this, though in a degree men’s work, is, in a greater degree and in a more special manner, the work of women. What honour is awarded to women who guard their health, develop their faculties and enlarge and enrich their minds, that they may be fitted to perform the community’s highest work? Absolutely none. True, it is not their only work; it does not fall to the lot of all to perform it; but every good and well educated woman, knowing herself to be a potential mother, tries conscientiously to fit herself for the part she may be called upon to play, and in so doing becomes aware of her own value. That so few women thus prove themselves to be good and well educated is scarcely the fault of women in particular. It is the fault of the whole community. Just as a Shakespeare and a Newton may rise superior to inadequate appreciation, so do some great women. But these women are, and must be, exceptions. The majority of women, no less than men, depend in large measure on the sympathy, approbation, and esteem of others. Perhaps women need these incentives even more than men need them, because for centuries their love of approbation has been developed abnormally by their dependence on men, and by the need they have experienced of securing their approval. Natural feelings, denied egress by the front door, find their way out at the back door. By reprehensible means, and greatly to the detriment of both sexes, women have continually forced themselves into notice, while fulsome flattery and exemption from work demanding the healthy employment of their faculties, have taken the place of legitimate and inspiring honour. A fresh result of the determined withholding from women of the distinction and approbation which has been honestly earned, is manifesting itself in a curious manner in these modern times. Women too noble by nature to indulge in ignoble ways the faculties within them that cried out for exercise, stung by taunts of inferiority, chafed by the deprivation of means for obtaining the rational education and the experience of the world which were to them as the very breath of life, conscious of talents no whit inferior to those of the men about them, have flung themselves into the whirl of public affairs, and, with truly admirable perseverance and indomitable pluck, have won for themselves the only honours open to them.