Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/185

 THE ADVANCE OF WOMAN

Follow Light and do the Right—for man can half control his doom— Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb!

—, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After.

Sixty years ago! To us of the present day it seems a very long time—a kind of "dark ages" period wherein we peer backward dubiously, wondering what everybody was like then. History, taking us by the hand, shows us, as in a magic glass, the Coronation of Victoria, one of the best Queens that the world has ever known, and tells us of the great men and masterly intellects of that past time, whose immortal works we still have with us, but whose mere mortal place knows them no more. Much may be seen in the backward glimpse that some of us may possibly regret and wish that we possessed again. Men of power and dominance, for example—great writers, great thinkers, great reformers—surely we lack these! Surely we need them sorely! But it seems to be a rule of Nature that if we gain in one direction we must lose in another, and whatever we have lost in that far-gone period, we have certainly gained much in the forward direction. One of the most remarkable changes, perhaps, that has taken place in the