ntly be
gone. To say that anything is changed, is to say that it is to change
further. If it never has been altered, perhaps it will not be; but a proved
alteration of an inch in a year opens the way to an indefinite
modification. The study of the glaciers, for instance, began with the
discovery that they had moved; and from that moment no one doubted that
they were moving all the time.

It is the same with the position of woman. Once open your eyes to the fact
that it has changed, and who is to predict where the matter shall end? It
is sheer folly to say, "Her relative position will always be what it has
been," when one glance at Sir John Lubbock's picture shows that there is no
fixed "has been," but that her original position was long since altered and
revised. Those who still use this argument are like those who laughed at
the lines of stakes which Agassiz planted across the Aar glacier in 1840.
But the stakes settled the question, and proved the motion. _Pero sim
muove_: "But it moves."

The motion once proved, the whole range of possible progress is before us.
The amazement of that Chinese visitor in Boston, the other day, when he saw
a woman addressing a missionary meeting; the astonishment of all English
visitors when young ladies teach classes in geometry and Latin, in our high
schools; the surprise of foreigners at seeing the rough throng in the
Cooper Institute reading-room submit to the sway of one young woman with a
crochet-needle--all these simply testify to the fact that the stakes have
moved. That they have yet been carried halfway to the end, who knows?

What a step from the horrible nuptials of those savage days to the poetic
marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett--the "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" on one side, the "One Word More" on the other! But who can say
that the whole relation between man and woman reached its climax there, and
that where the past has brought changes so vast the future is to add
nothing? Who knows that, when "the world's great bridals come," people may
not look back with pity, even on this era of the Brownings? Perhaps even
Elizabeth Barrett promised to obey!

At any rate, it is safe to say that each step concedes the probability of
another. Even from the naked barbarian to the veiled Oriental, from the
savage hut to the carefully enshrined harem, there is a step forward. One
more step in the spiral line of progress has brought us to the unveiled
face and comparativ