no less in the Christian home than in the Eastern harem, have been denied free expression of their individual natures by a tangled jungle of codes and superstitions, have been misinterpreted and uninterpreted, have lived in inert, smothering air; that nothing of this suits them, and that they do not like it.

Then suddenly, as often happens, but never causelessly, there is coherence here, explosion there, energy rushing to meet energy uniting and creating greater energy-and the new world is on.

Now, of the feminist movement so called suffrage is a tiny part, and of suffrage militancy is perhaps likely to be a merely English detail. Nevertheless, the English militants have not only performed several extremely important services to the whole woman movement, but, in their militant campaign, they are indicating a number of extremely interesting tendencies in the self-development of women that are entirely worthy of study.

ENGLISH MILITANCY AND SOLIDARITY

THE first obvious service that English militancy rendered to women was, of course, advertisement, an essential detail for any business, any end. Militant Englishwomen have put not only suffrage but feminism into the daily press and into periodical and permanent literature. Nothing has ever advertised anything so important so quickly as English militancy has gazetted women. This fighting group, spectacular, picturesque, with its aura of flame, its chants of terror, its supreme contempt for unfair law, and its fine defiance of one of the greatest empires of the world, has electrified into concentrated attention upon women the minds of women and men not heretofore interested in a problem that must have presented itself sooner or later for solving. It does not matter whether the attitude of these men and women is for or against; anything definite is better than a mental inertness over a bad state of public health and morals.

English militancy has done this also: it has broken rather completely the fetish of conventionality. For a long time to come women are to be the actively unconventional sex, and the sooner their conventions-which, to be sure, are not theirs,

but men's for them-are broken down, the easier the road for those who come after. When a woman goes out deliberately and breaks a law as a protest against lawmakers in power, she puts herself, by direct act, outside the pale of mere convention, and it can never seem quite so important to her again. This is always great personal gain to any one, and does not leave mere bystanders unillumined.

Then, English militancy is showing up this interesting trait in the sex-tagged "anabolic" by scientists, in contradistinction to catabolic man-that women are aggressive fighters, capable of planning campaigns, and of enduring suffering and outrage. It has always been admitted that women, like animals, will fight for their young. The English militants are proving that women, like men, will fight for what they want. This development of more fighting blood augurs well for the world's future, and it could not possibly have been created from the void. It is not a result of militancy; militancy is a result of it, wakened from its long sleep in the hearts of women.

Again, any attempt at direct action must prove to women that money is power and lack of it helplessness. Women have perceived this when food and shelter and clothing and defense against wrongs failed them. And yet they have not seen clearly, and to-day, even in the industrial world, working merely for their food and clothes and shelter, many of them do not see the spiritual necessity of their economic freeing. Witness how many of the younger women in industry lapse, with their marriage, into the old parasitism, and fall back gladly into the old dependence, the old getting of bread by their sex functions. Work and money they have never thought of as direct aids to the freeing of their souls; but militant women anywhere, working for what they want spiritually, see that their economic freedom is a must. It alone will not make women free, but without it every woman is a servant to or of some one or something.

Women have been until very recently the unsocialized sex-again the effect of their long suppression. Anything that tends quickly and thoroughly to socialize them is of the highest importance, and militant action is amazingly social in its

nature. It has brought women together from all ranks, classes, and races. The shop-girl and the titled lady have waked up in the same cell with the street girl, all of them tumbled and blear-eyed together. They are finding out more or less swiftly that there is n't much difference between them. And if some parasite woman smiles lightly here, and agrees, I shall be compelled to tell her that the militant woman and the street woman and she herself are all like products of the same social system that has cast them all into the same twisted, distorted mold. What is the street woman but a passive protest against the economic and moral code of man? What is the militant woman but an active protest against the economic and moral code of man? What is the parasite woman but the unprotesting product of the economic and moral code of man? In the common servanthood of women there is solidarity, and it is good for women to discover it through any means.

And then militancy has accomplished this as nothing else in the world to-day has accomplished it, I think, and the importance of it cannot be overestimated, nor can its ultimate effects be foretold. It has made clear the evolution among women of a moral code of their own, set up for themselves, of themselves, without regard to the wishes of men. Men, and most of their laws, have said that women's place in the world is in the home; these women say that their place in the world is in the world, and, if need be, on the fightingline. This is something new in the world.

THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM

aside from life. But what has been for women's detriment-that is to say, the whole false, superimposed standards of conduct to which they have shaped their shapeless, pliant souls-has been inevitably to man's detriment also. For their "silent influence" has been great indeed— and what an influence! The emanations of warped, suppressed, resentful, outwardly subservient beings. This from the stronger. From the weaker a more terrible parasitism, a more degrading materialism, the abject admission that, having no life whatever of their own to live, they will save their bodies and lose their souls by being what their masters have sincerely thought they wished them to be. The Early Victorian woman was the logical, finished product of woman molded perfectly to man's world, and ever since that falsest of eras there has been in steady process of growth an incoherent revolt of men against the handiwork of their fathers. Civilization has demanded from men an impossible attitude to women. a man, intelligent or unintelligent, give "reverence and respect" to an adult human being who, "entitled to no power," submits unresistingly to an enforced state of powerlessness, and then, to save herself alive, resorts to flattery and all the tricks, to petty tyranny, or to saintly passivity in the homes of men? Humanity respects and reverences power, material or spiritual, and it holds weakness in hearty contempt. Nevertheless, it is not likely that men will permit their traditional conception of what a woman should be to be changed peaceably into whatever women, in their searchings after their souls, may prove to be. It is unfortunately true that men shrink from revolution, and this evolution of woman's morality is likely to affect every part of sex-relationship and of life. It is something new in the world.

How can

It gives us, also, the real interpretation of what we are calling the woman movement. For just as it is most superficial to define the militant movement in England as the woman movement, so it is equally superficial to define the woman movement of the world as a political movement or a marriage-reform movement or a divorce movement or an

many more; but essentially and all-inclusively it is likely to be the greatest spiritual movement that the world has ever known, because it may mean the awakening, for the first time in the world's history of one half of the human race-and that perhaps its more dynamic half-to a seeking after soul, strength, self-mastery, personal destiny. We do not hear any thing of a man movement, because, poor and impoverished as it has been in its long, too heavily burdened world struggle, it has, nevertheless, always been this same spiritual impulse to find, through any means, one's self that is breaking at last the bondage of women. The road is no king's highway. It has not been easy for men, it will be a harder road for women; but the goal is worth the plowshares.

It will be a harder road for women because their way will be persistently blocked by old law, old morality, tradition, and they must give up for a time any hope of what has heretofore been the aim of the

human female, the approbation and the approval of men. This does not mean that they will meet inevitably antagonism instead; more often than not it is likely to be pure and simple bewilderment, which, while it does not give battle, gives neither sympathy nor understanding.

If they decline to

For if women are at a loss before the sight of their new world, men are to stand more aghast before the crumbling walls of their old one. The key-stone is falling; women are refusing, and must refuse, to accept the old ideals of the relations between men and women. be dependent longer, economically and spiritually, upon men, one of man's greatest spurs to action is taken from him, with no other incentive equally compelling yet given in its place. For all the advantage of modern stimuli is with the woman; all of life, unexplored, terrible, perhaps, but of compelling beauty, lies before her. If there is a woman problem, there is a man problem no less.

"Ihwa Victor Hugo laid the scene of a

T was here in Montreuil, you know,

part of 'Les Misérables,'" said Père Moreau, the old drawing-master, as he slowly stirred his coffee.

"Yes," he continued, "it was here that Jean Valjean, the convict fresh from the prison at Toulon, made a new beginning in life under the name of Père Madeleine, and rose eventually to the office of mayor. Fantine was born here, and returned to her native village to end her life in misery, and to find at last a resting-place in the potter's field."

Père Moreau and the painter who had arrived from Etaples that morning were seated in the little dining-room where Mme. Hembert serves her regular pensionnaires, and the common bond of the métier had brought the two naturally into

conversation while they lingered over their bistouilles, as the inevitable after-dinner coffee and cognac is known in local parlance.

"Is any slender thread of fact woven into that part of the romance which deals with Montreuil?" hazarded the painter, for his imagination had at once been fired with the thought, and his fancy reveled in the attractive vistas opened by this idea -vistas that were the more alluring because he had come upon them unexpectedly. He had read "Les Misérables" only in English translations, and since in these versions the name of the town was for some inscrutable reason always abbreviated to M sur M- -, it had not occurred to him to identify it with Montreuil-sur-Mer, where he now found himself.