off the track; she must see that first, and replace
herself. We are mothering the world still; but we are mothering
it, in a fearfully wide measure, all wrong.

Sacrifice is the beginning of all redemption. We must give up. We
must even give up the wish and seeming to have a hand in things,
that we may work unseen in the elements, and make them fit and
healthful; that daily bread and daily life may be sweet again
in dear, old, homely ways, and plentiful with all truly blessed
opportunities. We are not to organize the world, or to conquer it,
or to queen it. We are just to take it again and mother it. If
woman would begin that, search out the cradles--of life and
character--and take care of the whole world of fifty years hence
in taking care of them, calling upon men and the state, when
needful, to authorize her action and furnish outward means for
it--I wonder what might come, as earnest of good, even in this our
day, in which we know not our visitation?

And here again come allowance and exception for what women can
always do when this world-mothering forces an appeal to the
strength and authority of man. Women have never been prevented
from doing their real errands in the world, even outside the
domestic boundary. They have defended their husbands' castles in
the old chivalrous times, when the male chivalry was away at the
crusades. They have headed armies when Heaven called them; only
Heaven never called all the women at once; but when the king was
crowned, the mission done, they have turned back with desire to
their sheltered, gentle, unobtrusive life again. There has no
business to be a standing army of women; not even a standing
political army. Women have navigated and brought home ships when
commanders have died or been stricken helpless upon the ocean;
they have done true, intelligent, patient work for science, art,
religion; and those have done the most who have never stopped to
contend first, whether a woman, as such, may do it or not.

Look at what Dorothea Dix has done, single-handed, single-mouthed,
in asylums and before legislatures. Women have sat on thrones, and
governed kingdoms well, when that was the station in life to which
God called them. If Victoria of England has been anything, she has
been the mother of her land; she has been queen and protecting