"I"m thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more livable world life. Will they? I can"t say. But I will say this:
"Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must sanctify it or perish by it.
"Leisure! Culture! Emanc.i.p.ation! All nothing unless there is something more. Culture without action is an ingrowing disease which first debilitates and then dissolves the will to live. Emanc.i.p.ation without duty is a mirage of pleasure which raises thirst but never quenches it. The Romans emanc.i.p.ated their women, in the days of their degeneration, but with no result except a completer collapse of family life and of personal virtue.
"But perhaps there will be a new issue of events this time. It looks as if there might be.
"That weary ancient world, recoiling from its luxuries, its dissipations, its surfeits, turned to pessimistic mysticism, to the theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh are vile, to monastic withdrawal into the desert and the mountains, to the life of inward searchings.
"This modern world is turning to optimistic materialism, to the theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh can be made n.o.ble, to anti-tuberculosis societies and juvenile courts, to the life of outward workings.
"_That_ world found peace in _renunciation_. _This_ world seeks peace in _service_.
"It is going to be an era of the importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. It is going to be an era of Right Living.
"Will not woman have a _particular_ part in it? May she not even have a _dominant_ part in it?
"I have watched her every hour from the beginning--from the very first beginning of any life that had any warmth of love in it. I have seen her make the hearth the symbol of the stability of the individual life. Now, when the duties of the home, the stones of which that hearth was made, are scattered far and wide, shall I not see her rea.s.semble them on a grander scale to make a total of stability for all life whatsoever? Shall I not?"
"But who?" I said, "who are you?"
"I," she said, "I am the spirit that made woman love her child, and that shall yet make her love her kind."