s, and of the uses of muscle.

But the statistics of social progress in morals do not bear testimony
to masculine superiority as builder of the higher humanity. A man has
elaborated "The New Education," but he allowed, without stint, that
the moral elevation aimed at cannot be achieved except by the equal
opportunity and co-operation of woman.

In the administration of affairs and the institution of government man
is not a success. His first resort and last reliance is upon force.
Harmony, and justice, and fraternity, and purity, and honesty cannot
be brought into human society by fighting, nor evolved by the methods
of force. Neither the ballot nor the bullet, the legislature nor the
policeman, can make people honest or morally upright and sound.

The promotion of individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and
purity are the great requirements of humanity and of civilization.
The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of
feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are
the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which
the best specimens prefigure as the possibility of all.

The laws of Christendom and the usages of all civilizations are based
upon the idea of the superiority and supremacy of masculine quality
and of force. Upon the supposition that the husband is the bread
winner and provider, he is virtually in law and actually in fact as
effectually the owner of his wife and children as though he had bought
them for a sum, as is still the custom among some primitive peoples on
the planet.

In the Orient the idea that woman possesses a soul is rejected with
contempt. But in the more spiritualized Occident where she is
considered to be the possessor of a soul, she is by law, and
oftentimes by usage, not allowed to be possessor of her body.

Christianity in its inception and in its primitive purity accomplished
for woman the dignity of being possessor of a soul. She is still, even
in the most degenerate churchianity, counted responsible as a soul,
and accorded equal hope of redemption and of future equal standing in
another stage of existence.

But this fact, too, has bred in woman rebellion against the estimate
of her inferiority still held in the Church by many of the priestly
order, and actualized in the majority of Protestant denominations, and
universally in the Roman Catholic Church, by her exclusion from equal
powers and opportunities in it