r own.

Women to-day may prove themselves quite capable of doing, and
permanently, the work of men in ammunition and munition factories, but
it is patent that when human bipeds first groped their way about the
terrifying Earth, she was not equal to the task of leveling forests,
killing the beasts that roamed them, hurling spears in savage warfare,
and bearing many children for many years. She played her part in the
scheme of things precisely as Nature had meant she should play it:
she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of
man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls
to serve them. There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and
uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose
(which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going. And so it
would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever
enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where
to-day he so ingenuously desires to see her, and before whose
deliverance he is as helpless as old Nature herself.

Man obeyed the herding instinct whose ultimate expression was the
growth of great cities, invented the telegraph, the cable, the school,
the newspaper, the glittering shops, the public-lecture system; and,
voluntarily or carelessly, threw open to women the gates of all the
arts, to say nothing of the crafts. And all the while he not only
continued to antagonize woman, proud and eager in her awakened
faculties, with stupid interferences, embargoes and underhand
thwartings, but he permitted her to struggle and die in the hideous
contacts with life from which a small self-imposed tax would have
saved her. Some of the most brilliant men the world will ever know
have lived, and administered, and passed into history, and the misery
of helpless women has increased from generation to generation, while
coincidentally her intelligence has waxed from resignation or
perplexity through indignation to a grim determination. Man missed
his chance and must take the consequences.

Certainly, young women fulfill their primary duty to the race and,
incidentally, do all that should be expected of them, in the bringing
forth and rearing of children, making the home, and seeing to the
coherence of the social groups they have organized for recreation or
purely in the interest of the next generation.

Perhaps the women will solve the problem. I can conceive the time when
ther