Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/245

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LESBIA NEWMAN.
229

feel them their equals, they must learn to make them so. They have not learnt it yet, though some feeble steps are being made in the right direction, and even these few steps already show splendid results. Whole-heartedness is requisite in this all-important matter; every prejudice must be uprooted, every morbid predilection scoured off; it must be recognised that ‘womanliness’ is not a harem superstition, to be set up as a standard of conduct and blindly adhered to, it is rather an attribute concerning which, owing to the world’s past folly, we know very little indeed, but which is now to be revealed and developed as the goal of all knowledge whatsoever. By misuse of their opportunities given to educate their womankind to physical and intellectual equality with themselves, men have been hitherto held down in a condition where they are helplessly bound to expend in mutual enmity and destruction those energies which would have gone far to establish universal contentment; because there is a greater scourge even than war, that is, disease; and had women’s capacities been made the most of, medical science must have been vastly in advance of the stage it has reached, and a sound mind in a sound body having become a general instead of an exceptional blessing, the soil from which war springs would have been cleared of that weed. It may still not be too late to make up lost time—the good signs already alluded to seem to indicate that it is not; but prolonged indifference would be fatal, because the day of salvation is limited, and when a people—especially a great and powerful people—has let it slip by unused, the beyond is not an automatic millennium, but a catastrophe.

The hackneyed word salvation reminds one that there remains another consideration which may be worth weighing by those who have not established to their satisfaction that there is no future life, and no judgment to come for