"Higher education"--"Equal wages"--"Physical development"--"No household drudgery"--"Expansion of the ego," cried the conflicting voices; each with a quack panacea for the disease of discontent. Can it be that all this was but ten years ago? How quickly ideas are changing! I think that this noise among the women was the last wave of the democratic ideal expending itself. It was their restlessness under a sense of their inferiority to man. Until the nineteenth century, woman had been content to accept the male of her kind, with his mental and physical endowments, as the true standard of human excellence, and to humbly admit that she permanently failed to reach that standard. The universality of the democratic ideal aroused in her at last an unwillingness to admit her innate inferiority, and drove her to a desperate search for some fountain of Salmacis that should transmute her to an exact likeness of her long-time lord and superior. The search, of course, was delayed and confused by that furious and debasing _fin de siecle_ demand for happiness at all cost. She heard no talk anywhere of courage, submission, or duty. The later decades of the democratic century had refused to contemplate the world-old riddle of the blind Fates who create one vessel to honour and another to dishonour. So woman, no more than her fellows, would consider the caprices of destiny which from the union of one man and one woman will produce an heir to beauty, talent, and success, and from the same union--without volition or intention upon anyone's part--brings forth a cripple, an idiot, or the helpless Inadequate, who is foredoomed to failure with a grim gravitation no human laws or institutions can arrest. The nineteenth century was a sentimental one; unwilling to consider unpleasant truths. "All men _are_ born equal," it stubbornly persisted in asserting, and then was rather shocked when some of its offspring sought this equality of happiness at the sword's point or the bomb's fuse--as if content was a coin to be stolen and concealed about the person of the thief. Of course, the women finally became infected with the bacillus of unsound ideas, and struggling against the immutable burden of sex ran to and fro, crying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and wailing, "Where is _my_ happiness? Who has my happiness? You men have stolen and are keeping it from me!" A certain part of the charge was true, too. Men had filched from her. The theft was not a new one. If the statute of limitations could ever run in crimes against nature it might have almost ceased to be a wrong in this case, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years.