Always since the Galilean lived his revolutionary message—to reform man and not methods—every step in the world's ethical and moral progress has been inspired by the standard-bearer of a new idealism. With the wane of each century, the idealism which demanded the ascetic renunciation of earthly joys has been more sternly challenged, until a higher conception of true life-values is leading us back to the Greek ideal of beauty and happiness as the basis of a life-giving harmony.

Ellen Key's credo, "the enhancement of life through love, joy, and beauty in things small and great," implies much more than the joy of living. To her, happiness means "to love, work, think, suffer, and enjoy on an ever higher plane." She expounds her gospel in a glowingly picturesque and even startling way, and those who read coming events in to-day's idealistic tendencies believe that she has established the three truths on which our moral future will be based: 1, The futility of legislation and economic readjustments for bringing about the regeneration of the race; 2, The wisdom of courageous truthtelling as regards vital issues; 3, A truer recognition of the sacredness of human relations.

As a forerunner in urging the vital reforms for which we are fighting to-day, Ellen Key has always insisted on freedom for the new type of beings who are developing as a result of the transvaluation of moral standards that must eventually bring about a betterment of the species. The closing sentence in her most indignantly contested book, Love and Marriage, proves her intent to let her theories be a stepping-stone to changed and bettered marriage conditions, and not a plan for immediate action: "Those who believe in a humanity perfected by love must learn to count in thousands of years, not in centuries, much less in decades."

Why, then, do we hear all this hue and cry about Ellen Key's "immoral" precepts? To see danger in her reversal of accepted standards in sexual ethics is as misleading as was the popular interpretation of the high-handed exit of Ibsen's Nora. It would be just as absurd to accuse her of suggesting free love as a solution for marital tangles as it was to blame Ibsen for the panacea which "misunderstood women" found in his open-door theory. Both these idealists are counting in "thousands of years" for the consummation of their hope of social advance through the ennoblement of natural impulses.

In demanding new forms, Ellen Key asks freedom "for the only love worthy the name," the sanctified, self-sacrificing love that is life's highest spiritual expression: self-sacrificing only in the sense of giving and demanding the highest happiness in love. All other love she considers desecration, whether in marriage or out of it. "Her greatest victory is that pure-minded young men have made their own her demands of true morality," said one admirer on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. The new type of woman which is being evolved from this supreme test of her theories will be the corner-stone upon which the new creed of a higher freedom for both man and woman will rest. Fewer Priscillas, ever ready to bear the marriage yoke, will worship man as the lord of creation, and more Brunhildes will defend the fiery wall of newly-won privileges which protects the cherished freedom of their personality.

On the other hand, Ellen Key proves the possibility of making practical ideals fit to-day's needs in her plea for the rights of the child. What a neglected factor the child has been in our demand for the right to develop our own individuality! We are only beginning to concede his right to be well born and well equipped, physically and morally, for the task of finding his true place in the great scheme of existence.

What the dreamer Rousseau began, the centuries are slowly bringing to a splendid fruition. With two inspired women like Maria Montessori, who is freeing children's souls, and Ellen Key, fighting against our effete conception of the moral law, in the vanguard, we are slowly realizing our possibilities in making the most perfect development of the individual the basis of social advancement.

In The Century of the Child, a powerful leaven in the great social upheaval now going on, Ellen Key bases her plea for less training and more opportunity for free action on the premise that mankind can rise to its highest fulfillment only through the most perfect development of human impulses and the best training of the faculties. To this end she would change Froebel's dictum, "Let us live for the children," to the admonition, "Give the children a chance to live." "Aim to leave your child in peace, interfere as little as possible, try to remove all impure impressions, but above all else perfect yourself and let your personality, aided by reality in all its rude simplicity, become a factor in the child's development." Nietzsche expresses this essence of the educational wisdom of the ages more tersely: "See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only. Let a true marriage help thee to this end."

Ellen Key's arraignment of our present method of predigested instruction, of artificial spurs to endeavor, and of over-vigilance and protective pampering is a strong negative plea for more natural methods of training children. She thinks an adult person would lose his reason if some Titan should try to train him by the methods ordinarily employed with children. Like all right-minded people, she considers corporal punishment detrimental to the development of courage, energy, and self-reliance. She quotes the opinion of an educator who claims that many nervous little liars simply need good nourishment and outdoor life; and she holds the "good" school, with its over-insistence on versatility, responsible for the nervousness of our day.

The child should be trained to exercise his own powers: trained—not allowed to exercise them as he wills. Herein lies the misconception that leads many ultra-modern parents to give the reins into the child's own hands. We are in danger now of passing the Scylla of restrictive methods only to founder on the Charybdis of unrestricted liberty. Even the radical Ellen Key advises strict discipline for young children "as a pre-condition to a higher training." During the first and most important formative period she insists upon absolute obedience.

Our present system of training often limits the natural capacities of the child and shields him from life's real experiences. In answer to the assertion that splendid men and women have grown up under a system of repression and punishment, she argues that parents were consistent and unbending in earlier days: not over-indulgent and severe by turns, guided by nerves and moods, as are many parents of to-day.

"We need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer in ways infinitely numerous, that we now cannot even name," is her insistent plea.

Home influence, its settled, quiet order, and its call for tasks conducive to the happiness and the comfort of the family, is underestimated as an educational factor of great value. As soon as humanity awakens to the consciousness of "the holiness of generation," Ellen Key's ideal of a better parenthood will be realized. The mothers of the future must live according to her eugenic creed: to enhance life and to create higher forms. To this end she would consecrate woman as the priestess of life, who regards motherhood as a vocation of high worth, not as an incident or as an irksome task to be avoided.

In Motherliness and Education for Motherhood, she asks woman to concentrate her divergent interests in order to make herself more efficient for her most important duties, and she urges reform measures to so aid the working mother that she may devote more attention to her children. Another suggestion, to make a course in caring for children, in health culture and nursing, obligatory for girls, is a more rational demand than the European law for compulsory military duty, and would surely be productive of better results. The ethical as well as the practical value of efficiency is being recognized in the business world, in professional and educational life. Why not in the highest of all vocations—parenthood?

The Women Movement challenges those of Ellen Key's adversaries who claim that she opposes woman's emancipation: for her the most important woman question is the highest development of the individual woman. "Motherhood," she assures us, "will exact all the legal rights without which woman cannot, in the full sense of the word, be either child mother or community worker." Her glowing faith in the perfectibility of human nature, her courage in braving false interpretations of her creed, and her prophetic understanding of our most urgent spiritual needs give her the right to shed a blinding light on matters tabooed by those who fear the truth. She is not a disillusionist for courageous souls. Anyone who reads Life Lines understandingly is impressed by the author's tremendous sense of righteousness, and by the optimism of her prophecies.

In her biographies of noted women the forward-seeking vision in their lives and in their work is a typically modern note. Rahel Varnhagen has never before been drawn with the ultra-modern touch that reveals her aspiring soul as a strong influence in spurring on great men to unusual deeds of intellectual valor.

A humanitarian in the widest sense, Ellen Key disapproves of many forms of charity, while she insists upon the right of every human being to develop his best possibilities through an inspiring environment and a chance to express himself in his work. She once heard a young working-girl say: "It is not your better food and finer clothes we mostly envy, but it is the many intellectual enjoyments which are so much more within your reach than ours." The organization of the Tolstjerna circles was the result of this plaint. Women of wealth and culture, with a sympathetic understanding, met working girls on terms of equality. Ellen Key's beautiful home will belong to these girls in the future. Only four of them are to occupy it at one time; she wants them to be honored members of a family, not dwellers in an institution. The home is her sanctuary. All her "revolutionary" doctrines are directed towards its perfection by making men and women better able to guard its sacred flame and render it worthy to be the cradle of a new race of beings and a nobler civilization.