In the centuries to come, perhaps a thousand centuries from now,
perhaps a little sooner, woman will get her chance on earth.
Population will have reached its normal limit, and nature's wise
law, dealing with a really civilized race, will automatically
limit children to two in each family.
Schools and nurseries will be scientific and perfect. The care
of children will be the duty of the State. Very poor women will
be unknown, and unknown will be the woman burdened with the
isolated care of children in an isolated household.
In those distant days woman will do her share of the world's
intellectual and artistic work. Physical work of all kinds will
have been practically annihilated by machinery. Our big,
muscular bodies, developed hitherto with an eye to pursuing wild
animals, carrying heavy burdens and fighting each other like
dog-apes in the forest, will be refined and very different from
their present brutality.
It will be an agreeable earth, a very agreeable and much improved
human race. ----
Those millennial days, which are sure to come, will find us with
our little earthly problems solved. We shall have outgrown
our infancy, and, like a child that has learned to walk and
balance itself, we shall understand the forces of nature and use
them.
Our principal occupation will be harmonious life on this planet
and persistent investigation of the marvels of the universe
outside of our own little sphere.
As centuries have gone by on earth, power has dwelt with
different classes of human beings. In the days of the
Troglodytes, when one gentleman would crack another gentleman's
thigh-bone to get at the marrow, the most important man of course
was the one best able with physical force to murder his fellows.
At various times the great explorer, the great military
strategist, has been the most important of men. To-day the most
important man is the organizer of industry. He is really the
most important, not only in the size of his reward, but in the
service which he renders. Nature gives the biggest reward to him
who does the most important work.
A thousand centuries from now the most important human being will
be the most efficient astronomer.
The man who shall bring us accurate news of other worlds will be
welcomed as was Christopher Columbus or Drake or Raleigh in his
day.
Women will be very important factors in astronomical research.
The work of the astronomer is especially the work of patience, of
enthusiasm, of devotion.
Patience, enthusiasm and devotion are more highly developed in
women than in men.
Already, in view of her extremely limited opportunities, woman
has done admirably well in the field of astronomy. We note that
it is a woman at Cambridge whose stellar photographs first
located the new star in Perseus. In England, in Germany and in
France women astronomers are doing work almost equal to that of
the best men.
Everybody will remember the faithful labor of Herschel's sister,
working all through the night and sleeping through the day, month
after month and year after year, helping her great brother in his
studies.
There is a kind of small-fry man who dislikes the idea of mental
development among women. He is a mouselike kind of creature, so
thoroughly conscious of his own smallness, so thoroughly in love
with his own importance, that he dreads the intellectual woman,
who makes him feel microscopic.
Despite the protests of such men, some of whom are editors, women
are making progress. When they shall give to science, especially
to astronomy, the passionate, devoted attention which they have
given for ages to the care of children, they will rank among the
highest on earth.