Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/156

 anyone really believe that the world's work of healing and redemption is best done if the fruits of this sympathy and insight are packed into baskets and handed over to men who, with all the other matters about which they are so much keener on their hands, will just forget the baskets and allow the fruits to rot?

There is in women—no one can doubt it who has studied their works—a peculiar combination of idealism and practicality. The one without the other is either vapid or dry: the two together can move mountains. What distinguished the work of Elizabeth Fry, of Florence Nightingale, of Octavia Hill, of Lady Henry Somerset is just this combination. What makes the reports of the women factory inspectors so much more interesting than those of the men is again the same combination. When men in the House of Commons discuss the Housing Question, or what they call Education, the dulness of the debate is enough to send one to sleep. Why is it so dull? Because it lacks both actuality and ideality. Once the speakers have lost sight altogether of the child, and can begin to fight each other on the so-called religious question, they are at home, and the House fills; once they can leave off talking about the houses which are the homes of the people and the workshops of the mothers, and get to quarrelling about some party cry, they begin to revive. The fact is, that anyone worth his or her salt is keen about his or her job. The more you separate your legislative and executive powers from