And yet the number of men in our broad commonwealth who, during the past hundred years, have enjoyed such signal opportunities for attaining distinction in every domain of intellectual effort is incomparably greater than that of all the women so favored since the earliest days of human history. If, from the first flowering of Greek culture to the present day, as many millions of women had enjoyed all the transcendent advantages of education as have been in the United States so lavishly accorded to the same number of millions of men, who will say that very many of them would not have attained a much higher rank in science, as well as in art and literature, than has yet been reached by any man that America has yet produced? Who even, on the evidence now available, would be warranted in denying that at least some of these millions of women might have attained the very highest rank in every department of intellectual achievement?
Gray, in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, muses on the potential statesmen and the "mute, inglorious Miltons" of those countless multitudes who, for lack of opportunity to develop their inborn gifts, were condemned to pass their lives in obscurity and die, "to Fortune and to Fame unknown." But how much more truthfully could his words have been applied to that much larger number of women of rare mental powers to whose eyes knowledge
"Her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll,"
and whose God-given genius was ruthlessly suppressed from the cradle to the grave?
We are still in ignorance as to many of the conditions which are essential to the development of genius and which contribute to its loftiest flights. We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.
But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France—so long the reputed center of culture—has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. But shall we affirm that she will never give to the world imperishable works like Paradise Lost, Don Quixote or the Immaculate Conception? We know that Athens, which during the most brilliant period of its history counted only fifty-four hundred free-born citizens—less than the population of a small modern town—was able to produce within a very brief epoch more men of supreme distinction than all the rest of Europe from the Age of Pericles until the dawn of the Renaissance. Hers is still the art of the world, the literature of the world, the philosophy of the world, the culture of the world. For twenty-five centuries her canons of taste and beauty have guided poets, orators, artists; and her matchless productions have been the inspiration, as they have been the despair, of the greatest geniuses of our modern world.
Had the women of Greece not been put under constraint just as they were beginning to exhibit the splendid results of their intellectual activities; had they been encouraged to develop to the utmost their richly-dowered minds, as were the men, a far larger number of them, no doubt, would have been as successful in carrying off coveted prizes in the intellectual arena as was Corinna in her contests with Pindar. And they would, likewise, as we may easily conceive, have greatly added to the number of masterpieces of Greek intellect in science as well as in art and letters.
But the opportunity for women to test their powers, which was so wantonly snatched from their sisters in the Hellenic world, seems again to be offered to their sex. This opportunity, as has been stated, is due chiefly to their persistence in claiming the same right as men to intellectual development as well as to the countless proofs they have given that their demands are founded on reason and justice. What shall be the outcome of the new opportunity for woman to prove her capacity as compared with man's in things of the intellect remains to be seen, but, from indications she has during recent years given of her powers in every branch of scientific inquiry, there can be little doubt that it will be of such character as to place woman on a higher intellectual plane than she has yet occupied. In physical strength and in the rougher conflicts with the world she will doubtless always remain "the lesser man," but, once she feels in full possession of liberty
"To burgeon out of all
Within her,"
she will duly justify her advocates who throughout the centuries have been