Shall we turn from the platforms, and look to intellectual culture? We see at the outset that it cannot be necessary to heroism; for all human nature’s highest prizes are open to all, and great intellectual culture belongs to the few. Besides, there can be such a thing as learning too much, and knowing nothing worth knowing. In America, where life is lived double-quick, and where every product from a continent downwards is of the largest size, there are crops of overtaught girlhood ripe already for our inspection. Women of the middle classes there can discuss the nebular hypothesis or the binomial theory, as ours talk of lacework and the baby. Mr Hudson, in his recent _Scamper through America_, declares that to converse in the railway cars with ladies returning from Conventions and Conferences was a genuine pleasure, an intellectual treat. But he adds, that though one could revere them, almost worship them, to love them was out of the question. ‘Practical passionless creatures, they seemed to constitute a third sex. Where were the girls? We never saw them. We did meet with young ladies of twelve and thirteen, with jewel-laden fingers, and with vocabularies of ponderous dictionary words; but, like their mothers and elder sisters, they were such superior beings, that one longed for a lassie that was not so very clever—one who had something yet unlearned that she could ask a fellow to tell her about.’
We have failed in the novels, on the platforms, and at the learned Conferences. Shall we carry our search to the haunts of human suffering next? There are hundreds of women, banded together or working singly, to whom every form of sorrow and helplessness is an attraction. They do not deal in dry statistical philanthropy, but in loving compassion. They are not ‘women with a mission,’ because the woman with a mission flaunts it before the world, and gets more or less in everybody’s way; but these desire to remain unknown, never counting the debt humanity owes to them. The wounded soldier on the battlefield knows them well enough; and the criminal in prison; and the sick, the poor, the aged, the young children. Sacrificing a whole life to the common good, they are heroines; it is beyond doubt. But not the heroines we seek, whose sphere is to be something more homely, easy, and attainable for all. However, these women, whose lives are compassion, have given a light upon the track. It dawns upon us, that in womanly heroism, self-sacrifice is the essence, and hiddenness marks it genuine.