in the hearts of a good many women
themselves. But is it so? If to the man chiefly belongs power in all its
forms, does not the woman wield as her portion that far more potent but
wholly silent, and often unnoticed thing, influence? Not the storm, or
the earthquake, or the strong wind, but the still, small voice: the
benediction of dews and gentle rains, the mute beatitudes of still
waters flowing through sun-parched lands and transforming them into
"fruitful fields that the Lord hath blest"; the silent but irresistible
influence of the sunlight, which in the baby palm of a little leaf
becomes a golden key to unlock the secret treasures of the air and build
up great oaks out of its invisible elements; the still, small voice of
the moral sense, so still, so small, so powerless to enforce its
dictates, but before which all the forces of the man do bow and obey,
choosing death rather than disobedience--are not all these silent
influences emblems of the supreme, shaping, moulding influence that is
given to the woman as the "mother of all living," coming without
observation, but making far more strongly than any external power for
the kingdom of love and light? Truly we have a goodly heritage if only
we had eyes to see it. Alas! that we should have made so little
comparative use of it in these great moral questions. Alas! that we
should have to acknowledge the truth and justice of the poet's words:

Ah, wasteful woman! she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay--
How has she cheapen'd Paradise,
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilt the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine!"[33]

But even here is there not place for a hopeful thought, that if women
have made so little comparative use of their well-nigh irresistible
influence in setting a high standard and shaping men to a diviner and
less animal type, it has been, as I have already said, chiefly owing to
ignorance? The whole of one of the darkest sides of life has been
sedulously kept from us. Educated mothers, till lately, have been
profoundly ignorant of the moral evils of schools, and have never dreamt
that that young, frank, fresh-faced lad of theirs had any temptations of
the kind. Their moral influence, which the poet blames them so strongly
for misusing, has been largely, at least with good women, not so much a
mis