Such natures burn, above all, with the passion to find themselves. Then they burn with the passion to sacrifice themselves in order to help others, whose suffering or wrongs they feel as deeply as if they were their own. No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others. Such path-finders were the first apostles of the emancipation of women. They consecrated to this task a faith which required no proof, a faith which saw visions and heard melodies of the glorious future that their victory would prepare for mankind. They emanated neither from scientific investigations, nor from systems of political economy, nor from philosophic evidence, nor theories of political science. They flung themselves into the struggle with inadequate weapons, without plan of campaign, just as do all impelled by the spirit. But such a method always evokes later dissension among the disciples. Sects are formed, gradually a church is crystallised, an orthodoxy, a papacy, and an inquisition. This course is physically necessary as long as mankind is still in greatest part a mass. A Paul more “Christian” than Christ and a Luther more “Paulist” than Paul are met also in the woman movement. This has now, among most people of culture, passed beyond the stage of the great apostles and martyrs and heralds. The movement has reached the point where certain typical manifestations, certain conventional forms testify that the masses—which stoned the prophets—have now, since the ideas of the woman movement have become truisms, banalities, the fashion, appropriated them to themselves and endeavour to transform them to their image and adapt them to their needs. Again and again the old tale repeats itself: the trolls steal the weapons of the gods but they cannot use them. Again and again there is occasion to deplore the fact that the autocrat of genius, whether he rule over a people or a kingdom of ideas, has heirs, heirs who diminish his work. Again and again it must be recognised that no spiritual formation vanishes at one blow. The servile mind, intrigue, pettiness, delusion—all that, from which the great spirits of the woman movement hoped to “emancipate” woman—could not suddenly vanish out of the world. And since all this must go somewhere it finally finds room in the woman movement itself! But on the other side—since after all everything has another side—it must be admitted that the levelling and conserving tendency of the average person is of real value at the stage _when an idea begins to be transformed into law and custom_.