COMPENSATION.
By MRS. ALICE ASBURY ABBOTT.
As the time draws near when the curtain shall roll down upon this extraordinary drama of the exposition of the economic and aesthetic forces of the world, those who have known the history of the unusual difficulties confronting women are tempted to run up the story and look forward to some hoped-for compensation.
There are always people of loftiest impulses and purest ideals (occasionally they are illogical in their radicalism) who have little patience with the tread-mill course of human progress, who do not take kindly to the study of social economics, and who in practice, though not perhaps in theory, deny the scientific principle of emulation unless they can see the wheels go round. Such people hold there was no use for a woman’s building, and none whatever for a special exhibit through an independent representation, or in any sort of fashion. True, the interests of men and women are indivisible as a race, but they do not stand upon the same plane in respect to their opportunities, their social, legal and political rights. As an actual fact, the position she occupies, unarmed and defenseless, is at present that of:
“ Let her get who has the power,
Let her keep who can.’
The standard-bearers of the cause of women of an earlier period found it hard to recognize the conditions wh ; ch now confront us. It is so difficult to adjust one’s self to the life where the radicalism of yesterday has become the conservatism of today. Never in the history of the world has a radical principle become an accomplished fact until, after having served its purpose as an educator, it expresses the conservative sentiments of the mass.
There are social theorists and sound administrators of justice who insist that the way to repeal a bad law is to enforce it. There are people who would make war odious by carrying on war until conditions become so intolerable that all nations being waste and humanity rendered delirious by suffering, men should declare that peace must reign because the land is desolate and the very air heavy with the lament of the living for the dead. At the critical period when the opportunity for place and influence is to be seized, or at that sublime moment when public opinion is to be molded into tangible form, the statesmen, the politician and the man of affairs waste no time in reflections upon ideal theories.
Human nature being the same in man and woman, whatever difference there may be being the result of environment, success is never attained except through the recognition of one inexorable law of social and political economy. Expediency is the lever which has always finally forced the cause of human rights, and expediency will carry the advance all along the line. Not until it is proved that infraction of the great unwritten code of justice is detrimental to the true interests of the body politic has any vantage-ground been obtained by the individual sufferer. The appreciation of opportunity is the very genius of reform. When that opportunity is seized there may be frantic outcries of protest, ludicrous and sometimes malicious criticism and indignant howls from those who are compelled to keep up with the procession, but it is all futile. The inevitable logical result of the imperious demand of existing conditions carries the standard along the highway of progress, to be planted on the next vantage-ground,
Mrs. Alice Asbury Abbott is a native of Illinois. Her parents were Kentuckians. Her father, Henry Asbury, was a lawyer well known in Illinois during the past fifty years. She was educated in Quincy, 111., and in Germany. She has traveled in Europe and America. She married Abial Ralph Abbott, a lawyer of Chicago, who was born in New York and was a graduate of Amherst. Her principal literary works are translations from the German, magazine and newspaper articles. Mrs Abbott’s postoffice address is No. 353 East Fourth Street, Chicago, 111.
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