Page:The Future of Single Women.pdf/15

 who have no personal claim on her. If the love of the mother grows by continually rendering services to her child, the love of the woman grows by the protection she gives to the most helpless of humanity, and if the child has need of the mother, has not the unprotected girl much more need of the woman's help? Just as a mother's love leads her to cherish her child, so the woman's love leads her to protect the poor girl that crosses her path, and also to bring justice and mercy to the womanhood of the world. When she throws the weight of her highest gifts, her love, her intellect, her influence, her enthusiasm on the side of the neglected and friendless, she sanctifies those gifts to the noblest purposes of which humanity is capable. The social, legal, political interests of women, children, and young girls are those that specially call for a woman's protection; in this direction will be found the new and sacred function of the femme libre of the future. To protect the helpless and to guard the young, to enlarge the girdle of their liberty, to lay the foundations of their security and to build the house of their industry.

Thus, in rejecting the personal or the grosser form of love, a woman only leaves herself more free to give a larger, holier and deeper love to those who need it most. It is abuse of language to claim that love means only sexual or parental affection; it is false to assert that because a woman feels neither sexual nor parental affection, she is incapable of love.

The two-fold nature of love will be recognized in the future, as it has not been in the past. The love of humanity has still to take its place as the highest of which mankind is capable. Bacon recognized its two-fold nature when he said:—

"Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it."

Such a life will bring to a woman a rich harvest of happiness, in that she leaves the world a little better than she found it, and she may join in George Eliot's noble wish: