III

For the battle of to-morrow then there is a preliminary fight to-day.  The woman must come to this point, too.  In life there is frequently so much meanness, a man is often called to acknowledge some degrading standard or fight for the very recognition of manhood, and the woman must stand in with him or help to pull him down.  Let her understand this and her duty is present and urgent.  The man so often wavers on the verge of the right path, the woman often decides him.  If she is nobler than he, as is frequently the case, she can lift him to her level; if she is meaner, as she often is, she as surely drags him down.  When they are both equal in spirit and nobility of nature, how the world is filled with a glory that should assure us, if nothing else could, of the truth of the Almighty God and a beautiful Eternity to explain the origin and destiny of their wonderful existence.  They are indispensable to each other:  if they stand apart, neither can realise in its fulness the beauty and glory of life.  Let the man and woman see this, and let them know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its favourites.  We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives about in luxury because he is obsequious to it:  he prefers to be a parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits.  He has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls “the soul of a servant.”  If we are to prepare for a braver future, let us fight this evil thing; if we are to put by national servitude, let us begin by driving out individual obsequiousness.  This is our training ground for to-morrow.  Let the woman realise this, and at least as many women as men will prefer privation with self-respect to comfort with contempt.  Let us, then, in the name of our common nature, ask those who have her training in hand, to teach the woman to despise the man of menial soul and to loathe the luxury that is his price.

IV

I wish to come to the heroic type of Irish Womanhood.  When we need to hearten ourselves or others for a great enterprise, we instinctively turn to the examples of heroes and heroines who, in similar difficulties to ours, have entered the fight bravely, and issued heroically, leaving us a splendid heritage of fidelity and achievement.  It is little to our credit that our heroes are so little known.  It is less to our credit that our heroines are hardly known at all; and when we praise or sing of one our selection is not always the happiest.  How often in the concert-hall or drawing-room do we get emotional when someone sings in tremulous tones, “She is far from the Land.”  There is a feeling for poetry in our lives, a feeling that patriotism will not have it, a melting pity for the love that went to wreck, a sympathy for ourselves and everybody and everything—­a relaxing