Miss Pechey was a loyal and stimulating comrade throughout, disarming opponents by the personal charm, intelligence[intelligence] and humour which eventually opened the Irish College and gained the actual concession of the right of registration.
Mrs. Thorne contributed a fine undercurrent of stability. It was not her way to write picturesque letters that lend themselves to quotation, but it was mainly owing to her that the London School became a lasting and conspicuous success.[[133]]
Pari passu with all this, as we have seen, and antecedently to any of it,—Mrs. Anderson was quietly showing the English world that a woman can be a reliable and successful doctor.
Fine records all four, and surely no less fine was the brave, wise, unwearying championship of Professor Masson and Sir James Stansfeld, without whom—humanly speaking—nothing could have been achieved at all.
Sir James Stansfeld would not have allowed us to draw the line there. In an able sketch of the whole movement up to 1877, in the Nineteenth Century, he concludes his survey with the following significant words:
“One thing more remains to record. These pages will, I think, have presented to the reader’s mind evidence of a tough and persistent and continuous struggle. Such struggles do not persist and succeed, according to my experience, without the accompanying fact, the continuous thread, as it were, of one constant purpose and dominant will. Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake has made that greatest of all contributions to the end attained. I do not say that she has been the ultimate cause of success. The ultimate cause has been simply this, that the time was at hand. It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for a reform has come you cannot resist it, though, if you make the attempt, what you may do is to widen its character or precipitate its advent. Opponents, when the time has come, are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress—they help to turn them. The strongest force, whichever way it seems to work, does most to aid. The forces of greatest concentration here have been, in my view, on the one hand the Edinburgh University led by Sir Robert Christison, on the other the women claimants led by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake. Defeated at Edinburgh, she carried her appeal to the highest court, that most able to decide and to redress, the High Court of Parliament representing the Nation itself. The result we see at last. Those who hail it as the answer which they sought have both to thank, in senses and proportions which they may for themselves decide.”[[134]]
It would be easy to close on this note, but it is on the earlier part of Sir James Stansfeld’s conclusion that one prefers to dwell. A tough and persistent struggle is indeed recorded in these pages—it was only on working through the vast mass of original documents that the present writer formed the faintest conception how tough and persistent that struggle had been—and yet what will strike the reader most is that it was emphatically not a “one man fight.” S. J.-B. never said “I” in connection with it. “You see we were so splendidly helped,” was her almost invariable comment on looking back.
And she was splendidly helped. Not only by her fellow-students, by friendly professors, by the Editor of the Scotsman, and by those who would fain have been her patients. All that one was prepared to find. The amazing thing is the way in which—when all of these were almost paralyzed by the strength of the opposition (yes, and by her mistakes)—help came from somewhere. It might be the working-man, sending her a shilling to represent his sympathy, or the statesman in a London club, throwing down his newspaper with the determination that that woman should be baited no longer. In any case help came.
Truly, as Sir James Stansfeld said, the time was at hand.
And Newman is perfectly right when he says that, if the individual be powerful-minded and the cause good, the mistakes actually help. They increase the talk, increase the interest, help to make the picture that appeals to the popular imagination, till what has seemed to be the eccentric action of a single individual spreads out in waves that envelop the whole earth.