Again, whither? This time whither my own nature leads. I have learned this by experience, that leadership for me lies not without, but within myself. So much is gained, and now once more for movement. Gather up the effects--all that we have brought with us out of the past: it will find use. For woman has been woman so far as she has been anything, and the aromas of that high estate have hung and still hang about her. Bear them along. The finest effluence of her life in the first century of our era, as in this last, was love. Mary then bore the Christ; other Mary's loved him. Woman was first in his life, and last in it. When the bearded magi adored, she loved; she was the illustrator of his teachings, the repository of his hopes for their future realization. Bring all those memories, visions, yearnings, trusts, faiths--dreams of the good, never yet seen but by the inner sight of the woman-soul,--along, and let us set out for Beulah. Its blooming fields and fair mountains lie dim but sweet on the distant horizon. We will go over and possess them--a kingdom of our own. Why have we waited so long in bondage and darkness? Why submitted to the heaped-up wrongs of the ages? Patience very excellent: once admit the idea of a scheme, and some parts must necessarily arrive in the afternoon. Development presupposes the delay or withholding of things not yet developed. By the law of climax, these are not the unimportant parts. Woman's sovereignty has been long deferred, because of the preparation necessary for it. A John the Baptist must precede the Christ in the wilderness. Fiends robed and sceptred, once reigned over fiends clothed in skins and armed with broadsword and battle axe. To-day a _gentle_man, or _gentle_woman can sit secure on any throne of Christendom. While we congratulate ourselves, let us not deny that the Tamerlanes, the Alarics, the Napoleons have had their share in the intermediate work of preparation.
Not always, as it seems to us, do the swiftest and clearest methods find favor with these hard-pressed worthies, but rather such methods as they can employ; and in time, as we see, the work gets done.
Take our planet in the condition in which its first proprietor found it on his arrival, and you will see that the improvements would be a heavy item in transactions with a real-estate broker for it. Liberal governments established--Canton, Paris, London, New York built--grain fields, mills, patent offices, world's fairs, electric telegraphs, ocean steamers, iron-clads, Central Park, show a long road travelled, and much rough, terrible, fearful work done by the way--work which has developed a condition for the exercise of the fine sovereignty of woman's pure, gentle, loving, harmonious nature--road which leads by divine intention to her empire. If the hand which has opened it has been red at times, let us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the Thermopylæ--if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf, when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages--to whose harvest we are drawing nigh.