These are the triumphs of a single generation against one of the deepest-rooted prejudices of social life. One thinks instinctively of some iron-bound coast, where the wavelets ripple feebly to the foot of the beetling cliffs, and where even the fiercest storms fling their waters impotently on the adamantine front. And one day there occurs a convulsion of the crust, the culmination of a slow alteration of level, and the storms begin to tear wide breaches in the enfeebled barrier. From that day the confining rock is doomed. There has been an alteration of level in the social, industrial, and political life of the world. Large breaches have been torn in the ring of prejudice that confined the life of women. Here it has been the granting of municipal franchise or the power to serve as Poor Law Guardians; there it has been the right to vote for the national Parliament; at one place the right to sit in Parliament. The confining bonds are doomed. The political evolution of woman is running in a channel that it had never reached before in the history of the world, and all the abortive rushes of earlier ages have no moral for the present time. The only question now is, how long can the reef of prejudice survive? Nay, we are not talking of unconscious stone, but human hearts and minds, and the real question is: Which great nation will win the honour of recognising first that the age of despotism is over and the position of woman in the commonwealth radically changed? CHAPTER IX. THE MORAL BASE OF ENFRANCHISEMENT THE general sketch I have just completed, of the evolution of woman's political position from the earliest and dimmest human communities to the twentieth century, has vindicated the law which I set out to prove. This essay is in no sense a chronicle of women's agitations, women's disabilities, and women's victories. It is a simple effort to discover a principle, and only sufficient details have been included for its purpose. They have made it clear that, in the first place, the subordination of woman springs from a barbaric institution, is always challenged (both by men and women) when a nation reaches a high stage of culture, and is continuously modified as the mental and moral cultivation of the community grows. Since it is inconceivable that civilisation should perish or retrograde again, in the new world of our time, it follows that the present feminist movement cannot sink back into submission, but will continue with the spread of culture, until woman's position is adjusted on principles of general equity and reason.