It has often be said of the Boer woman that she, almost alone, still sits immovable in her elbow chair, while all her sisters, Teutonic, and even Keltic and Slavonic, have risen to their feet; and that while the women of all European societies, from New Zealand to America, from Australia to Russia, have risen, or are tending to rise up, to re-adjust their relations to human life, she alone sits stolid in her elbow-chair. It is said of her that in that vast movement, which without leaders or instigators, is taking its rise from end to end of the civilized world, awakening in the heart of the young English girl on solitary karoo plains, stirring in the breast of the duchess in her boudoir, and guiding the hand of the working-girl as she knocks for admission at the door of the factory--that movement which, like some vast tidal wave, silently gathering strength as it swells in the ocean depths, will break at last on the shores of life, carrying all before it; and, whether for good or for evil, will accomplish a more radical modification in human life than any the world has witnessed, since in pre-historic ages the discovery of fire or of letters modified all future human existence on the globe--it is said of her that in this movement the Boer woman has no part. This is true, and well it may be so. For let us pause an instant to consider what, in its ultimate essence, this Woman's Movement represents. It is not a sudden endeavour on the part of earth's women to attain to greater physical enjoyment or more luxurious ease. There have been self-indulgent and sensuous women since the days when our fore-mothers ground corn with handstones, individual women seeking ever to increase their sexual and sensual enjoyments, and evade their burdens; but it is noticeable that it is exactly these women who are _not_ found in the van of change to-day. If the woman's movement of this country may be said to have its origin in any one class more than another, it is exactly among those women of the wealthier classes whom modern life has supplied with overwhelming liberality with all the material enjoyment and comfort which existence can yield; and who have no physical or sexual indulgence or material good to gain by change, but who have much to lose. It is these women, and not the overtasked labourer's wife with ten children to rear, feed, and labour for, it is these women above all who have started to their feet and are demanding the re-organization of their relations to life; and side by side with the factory girl and the ill-paid solitary spinster whom the struggle of life is driving to the wall, are found the millionaire's daughter and the countess, and the comfortably situated woman of the middle classes, for whom earth has left no material good unyielded. The Woman's Movement is essentially _not_ a movement on the part of civilized women in search of greater enjoyment and physical ease.