176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



soul of the controversy ; for the whole question is contained in the 

 relative importance of individual rights and social duties — freedom 

 for self-development in such direction as may suit ourselves, or sub- 

 ordinating our personal desires to the general and unindividualized 

 good. 



We are in the midst of one of the great revolutions of the world. 

 The old faiths are losing their hold and the new are not yet rooted ; 

 the old organization of society is crumbling to pieces and we have not 

 even founded, still less created, the new. In this revolution, naturally 

 one of the most prominent facts is the universal claim for individual 

 freedom, outside the elemental laws which hold the foundations to- 

 gether, made by every one alike. We preach the doctrine of rights 

 everywhere, that of duties straggles in where it can ; and the one cry- 

 ing need of the world at this moment is for some wise and powerful 

 organizer who shall recombine these scattered elements and recon- 

 struct the shattered edifice. Women, who always outstrip their lead- 

 ers, are more disorganized, because at this time they are even more 

 individualized, than are men. Scarcely one among them takes into 

 account the general good. Even in those questions where they have 

 made themselves the leaders, individual victories are of greater value 

 than general policy, and they would always subordinate the practical 

 welfare of the majority to the sentimental rights of the minority. An 

 individual sorrow moves them where the massed results of a general 

 law leave them cold. This characteristic is perfectly sound and right- 

 eous in those to whom have been confided the care of the family and 

 the arrangement of details. Women ought to be individual, not for 

 themselves but for others ; and in that individualism there ought to 

 be the injustice inseparable from devotion. An altruistic mother who 

 would sacrifice her one child for the sake of her neighbor's two does 

 not exactly fulfill our ideas of maternal care ; on the other hand, a 

 mother who would rather her son was disgraced as a coward than 

 that he should run the dangers of courage, or the partisan of her 

 own sex who would sacrifice twenty men to save one woman incon- 

 venience or displeasure, is as little fit to be the leader of large move- 

 ments involving many and varied interests as is that other to be a 

 mother. In their own persons women carry out to a very remarkable 

 degree this principle of individualism, the general good notwithstand- 

 ing. Speak to an ordinary woman of the evil economic effects of her 

 actions, and you speak a foreign language. She sees only the indi- 

 vidual loss or gain of the transaction, and a public or social duty to 

 creatures unknown and unseen does not count. In the cruel vicissi- 

 tudes of fashion and the ruin of thousands brought about by simple 

 change of material — in the selfish greed for bargains, no matter at 

 whose cost obtained — in the complete ignoring of and indifference to 

 all the results to others of her own example, a woman of the ordinary 

 type is essentially individual and unsocial. In America — whence, how- 





