till it is advanced enough to ask for better methods than man's. When
this stage is reached, life is ripe for the advent of woman--it appeals
to her to come forward. It prepares better conditions, that it may
invite her--opens fields, that it may engage her powers--seeks to clothe
her in a real dignity, of which she has before worn rather the semblance
than itself. Society, obeying the higher view of her, enacts new laws
for her enlargement, modifies or sets aside social canons which
restricted and warped and suppressed her, and begins with these
movements to find itself enriched by the presence of finer influences;
led upward to more exalted standards, penetrated with a subtler humane
sentiment than it before knew.

Yet with all these movements in her favor, woman, bone of man's bone,
remains a bone of contention to him, till nature, read truly and trusted
reverently, is allowed to lead him as a little child by the hand and
show him woman's real kingdom. He must not look on it with a timid or a
grudging eye. A Chinese mandarin in California, becoming acquainted
with the fact that American women could read and write and be trusted
with accounts, replied, with a warning shake of the head, 'If he readee,
writee, by and by he lickee all the men.' Does this apprehension
possibly extend beyond the Celestial Empire? It will not be expressed, I
know, but there is much unexpressed feeling which is none the less real
for its silence.

'Every woman is an embodied revolution, now-a-days,' said a lank,
grumbling dyspeptic, while the autumn leaves of '62 yet hung in bright
profusion on the bordering forests of the Hudson. 'If you had said every
woman is in these days an embodied revelation,' was the superb reply,
'you would have done both truth and my sex more even justice.' Man must
not fear woman, for whatever nature designed for her is not only
inevitable, but is his only means of salvation. He need not fear her,
for she is the daughter of nature, so full of loyalty and filial
devotion to her mother, that no wide or continued departure from her
designs is possible. He will not fear her when he is religious enough to
feel that each natural revolution is a step in the march upward, ordered
in its season as calmly and inexorably as were the secondary rocks laid
down when the primary had been prepared for receiving them, as the
nebulous vapor is consolidated into a planet or sun, or the
morning-glory brought forth of its sown seed.