Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things
as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her
complete womanhood.
But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school--which has
perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her
womanhood--and coming under the influence of some of our modern
champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book
as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which
declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that
if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be
transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours
which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking
their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have
wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with
content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers
provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be
love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for
suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men
about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us
a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman,
the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman
to seize her, she--if the pronouns be not too definite in their
sex--fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind"
upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc.
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