Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/119

 of her work. When her name is mentioned to-day, visions of a tender woman bending over the sick-bed, binding the broken limb or closing the dying eyes, a woman whose name soldiers breathe with their last breath, whose shadow on the wall they kiss, whose every movement they follow with their eyes, are what is seen in the mind's eye. But to other gifts, also, of hers the nation owes a debt—to her royal impatience of red-tape, stupid officialism, and lordly ignorance and incapacity, and to her wonderful powers as an organiser. Out of her way, whenever she could, she swept the follies that blocked it, and brought order, comfort, and efficiency, where before their opposites had made death and desolation supreme.

The saintly Josephine Butler could not be left out of any account of those women who have in a very special way served the best interests of society, though the nature of her work makes her story somewhat difficult to tell. Never a woman lived less fitted to endure without suffering the cruelties which a pioneer of public opinion must ever be prepared to endure, and which must inevitably be more than doubled when the cause is such as the one she chose to champion. This wife of a Liverpool professor was a beautiful creature, delicate and sensitive, cultivated and refined, driven by an inward prompting to take up the cause