ence is a gigantic, vigilant detective, dealing
with a population of suspects. Its physical methods only are uniformly
clear, honorable, straight-forward though. Even these in times and
places might be nobler, more open; but it fights well, labors well,
cultivates well, invents well, manufactures well, because in these it is
dealing chiefly between its native elements, force and matter;--but
being characteristically inductive, it cannot deal liberally with human
nature, lacking the ideal of it, the faith in it, the reverence for it
which are the only sustaining root of such behavior toward it.

Under the new sovereignty, the methods, like the power employing them,
will have their nearest relations with the interior life. They will draw
helps from the outward; and here the glory of man as a creator of
conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully
appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw
thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to
goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great
thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than
without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions which
establish and confirm true relations between the soul and its helps. It
is greatest to create the soul to be divine--with helps, or in spite of
hindrances. The first is eminently the office of the masculine. The
second is shared between it and the feminine, with a preponderance to
the latter; and the last belongs so exclusively to woman, that the day
of its doing is necessarily the day of her sovereignty.

The divine, artistic, harmonious creation of the human spirit in the
divine, artistic, harmonious human body, this is the grand function of
the feminine era. For this it is that woman has those special finer
endowments which in all ages have distinguished her from man, and
foreshown a higher life for her in some future--some Beulah, visible to
eyes that could o'ershoot the bounds of the passing age. Wanting this
power, preparing the day of its advent, John Baptist has toiled,
sweated, groaned, fumed, devastated in his wilderness, to touch its
hither border at last in this pregnant nineteenth century. Age of
revolution--age of wonders!--of which the very greatest are, I think,
the beginnings we already see of settlement here. As a question, that of
woman is not an old one. There can be no Woman Question among any people