The result, with the general stimulation of radical thinking that the War involves, will be a profound acceleration of the feminist movement throughout, at least, the democracies of the world.  Already it is being recognized that all valid principles of democracy apply to women equally with men.  Regenerated, if chaotic, Russia takes for granted the farthest reaches of feminism.  The regime in England, that bitterly opposed suffrage for women, is now voluntarily granting it before the close of the War.

Thus the victory of the allied nations will mean the fruition of much of the feminism that is a phase of humanism.  It will mean freeing women from outgrown custom and tradition, from unjust limitations in industrial, social and political life.  It will mean men and women working together, on a plane of moral equality, with free initiative and voluntary co-operation, for the fruition of democracy.  Just as that fruition will see the end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no more women slaves or parasites, none regarded or possessed as property, but only free human beings, each self-directed and self-controlled, and responsible for his or her own personality and conduct.

XIV

THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY

The nineteenth century was the period of rapid growth in adhesion to those ideals of democracy for which the War is being fought.  It is not so well recognized that during the same hundred years democracy was so transformed as to be to-day a new thing under the sun.

Up to the time of the French and American revolutions democracy rested largely upon certain abstract ideas of human nature.  Rousseau could argue that in primitive times men sat down together to form a state, each giving up a part of his natural right to a central authority, and thus justifying it.  We now know that nothing of the kind ever happened, that society had undergone a long process of development before men began to think about it at all.  We continue to repeat the splendid at all.  I refer, of course, to the women of antiquity.  Where respectable, these were the head of the household slaves, scarcely removed from the condition of the latter.  The few women who did achieve freedom of thought and action, and became the companions of cultivated men—­the Aspasias of antiquity—­bought their freedom at a sad price.

So Rome is called a republic, and it is true that, during the first half of her long history, freedom gradually broadened down from the patrician class to the plebeian multitude.  When Rome reached out, however, to the mastery of the most impressive empire the world has seen, she never dreamed of extending that freedom to the conquered populations.  If she did grant Roman citizenship to an occasional community, to enjoy the rights and exercise the privileges of that citizenship, it was necessary to journey to Rome.  It was the city and the world:  the city ruling the world as subject.