ies of womanhood.

But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to
objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent
argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a
notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem
wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content
with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to
her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more
ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room,
when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the
female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.

It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic
than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her
workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her
spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of
Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as
mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure
within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must
be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who
occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the
gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild,
tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides
the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.

A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether
this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical
world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is
only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that
motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of
heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true
of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be
easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral
nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is
before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.

Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to
this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the
radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern
society.