War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war. Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands, not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of the sun, comes Democracy. This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was--perhaps through its freedom from war and war alarms--eagerest in seizing upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two sexes, has been most rapid. Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were really all toilers--until recently almost all toilers at occupations close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era--the era of steam and electricity--developed with us, our women and our men naturally remained side by side.