Man obeyed the herding instinct whose ultimate expression was the growth of great cities, invented the telegraph, the cable, the school, the newspaper, the glittering shops, the public-lecture system; and, voluntarily or carelessly, threw open to women the gates of all the arts, to say nothing of the crafts.  And all the while he not only continued to antagonize woman, proud and eager in her awakened faculties, with stupid interferences, embargoes and underhand thwartings, but he permitted her to struggle and die in the hideous contacts with life from which a small self-imposed tax would have saved her.  Some of the most brilliant men the world will ever know have lived, and administered, and passed into history, and the misery of helpless women has increased from generation to generation, while coincidentally her intelligence has waxed from resignation or perplexity through indignation to a grim determination.  Man missed his chance and must take the consequences.

Certainly, young women fulfill their primary duty to the race and, incidentally, do all that should be expected of them, in the bringing forth and rearing of children, making the home, and seeing to the coherence of the social groups they have organized for recreation or purely in the interest of the next generation.

Perhaps the women will solve the problem.  I can conceive the time when there will have developed an enormous composite woman’s brain which, combining superior powers of intuition and sympathy with that high intellectual development the modern conditions so generously permit, added to their increasing knowledge of and interest in the social, economic, and political problems, will make them a factor in the future development of the race, gradually bring about a state of real civilization which twenty generations of men have failed to accomplish.

But that is not yet, and we may all be dead before its heyday.  The questions of the moment absorb us.  We must take them as they arise and do the best we can with existing conditions.  The world is terribly conservative.  Look at the European War.

II

Nowhere are fortunes so insecure as in the United States.  The phrase, “Three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves,” was not coined in Europe.  But neither does it embrace a great American truth Many a fortune rises and falls within the span of one generation.  Many a girl reared in luxury, or what passes in her class for luxury, is suddenly forced out into the economic world with no preparation whatever.  It would be interesting to gather the statistics of men who, with a large salary, or a fair practice, and indulged family, and a certain social position to keep up, either vaguely intend to save and invest one of these days—­perhaps when the children are educated—­or carry a large life insurance which they would find too heavy a tax at the moment.