Let us endow the Daughters:  those who are not clever, in order to save them from the struggles of the Incompetent and the hopelessness of the Dependent; those who are clever, so as to give them time for work and training.  The Bread-winner may die:  his powers may cease:  he may lose his clients, his reputation, his popularity, his business; in a thousand forms misfortune and poverty may fall upon him.  Think of the happiness with which he would then contemplate that endowment of a Deferred Annuity.  And the endowment will not prevent or interfere with any work the girls may wish to do.  It will even help them in their work.  My brothers, let our girls work if they wish; perhaps they will be happier if they work let them work at whatever kind of work they may desire; but not—­oh not—­because they must.

[1888.]

FROM THIRTEEN TO SEVENTEEN

In the history of every measure designed for the amelioration of the people there may be observed four distinct and clearly marked stages.  First, there is the original project, fresh from the brain of the dreamer, glowing with the colours of his imagination, a figure fair and strong as the newly born Athene.  By its single-handed power mankind are to be regenerated, and the millennium is to be at once taken in hand.  There are no difficulties which it will not at once clear away; there are no obstacles which will not vanish at its approach as the morning mist is burned up by the newly risen sun.  The dreamer creates a school, and presently among his disciples there arises one who is practical enough to reduce the dream to a possible and working scheme.  The advocates of the Cause are still, however, a good way from getting the scheme established.  The battle with the opposition follows, in which one has to contend—­first with those who cannot be touched by any generous aims, always a pretty large body; next with those who are afraid of the people; and lastly with those who have private interests of their own to defend.  The triumph which presently arrives by no means concludes the history of the agitation, because there is certain to follow at no distant day the discovery that the measure has somehow failed to achieve those glorious results which were so freely promised.  It has, in fact, gone to swell the pages of that chronicle, not yet written, which may be called the ‘History of the Well-intentioned.’

The emancipation of the West Indian slaves, for instance, has not been accompanied by the burning desire for progress—­industrial, artistic, or educational—­which was confidently anticipated.  Quite the contrary.  Yet—­which is a point which continually recurs in the History of the Well-intentioned—­one would not, if it were possible, go back to the former conditions.  It is better that the negro should lie idle, and sleep in the sun all his days, than that he should work under the overseer’s lash.  For the free man there is always hope; for the slave