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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

Surely a knowledge of the one fact, that the average yearly income of the work­ing woman of Boston exceeds her expenses for positive needs only about eight dollars, might well fill the consciousness of any woman who is tolerably bright and appre­hensive w T ith a sense of impending doom. Yet this is but one illustration of the evils which follow in a special line of injustice, afflicting the wrong-doer even more than the wronged; and were we to follow out all the iniquities in which woman has been involved, we would surely find a point in all these entanglements where the same dis­astrous lesson and result is revealed for man. “Every benefactor,” says Emerson, “becomes a malefactor by continuation of his activity in places where it is not due.” From the hour in which woman was sufficiently awakened, through intellectual quick­ening, to deliberately and voluntarily board the car of progress, every obstacle that man puts in the way of her advance reveals him as a malefactor, a train-wrecker, and all the constabulary of the universe are after him. A benefactor he might have been before the moment arrived for her decisive journey; but from that moment he becomes a malefactor if he does not leave the track clear, and the law of equilibrium or equity deals out punishment to him proportioned to his crime. Yet what better evidence could there be of a concession and recognition on the part of man, which must ulti­mate in the fulfillment of our largest hope, than the place so cordially assigned to woman in this Columbian Exposition by the powers that be? It is no less than a world-wide announcement of her coming on, verified in every form of art and indus­try. For the first time in the > history of the race the governmental powers have fashioned an auditorium where a world gives hearing to woman, and through her own powers of creation and invention she speaks the same language as man, varying only in a tone and modulation which beautifully and forever enhances the distinctive attributes of sex.

No niggardly dole is this to us, but the grandest privilege of all history, dating in myriad forms of art, literature and invention the fullness of time for woman’s eco­nomic debut; and permit me to direct your attention to the wonderful significance of this sentence, “ the fullness of time.” There is no sentence in all Scripture so plenary with philosophic meaning as this. It solves for us the vexing problem of pro­crastination and delay which has seemingly attended woman’s advancement. If hope deferred has heretofore made the heart sick, this sentence should from henceforth preserve us from all such abnormal lapses; for we must learn and remember that nature or evolution delights in appropriateness, and will have all things in keeping. She will not vary one hair’s breadth from this principle, though humanity, wild with desire, frantic with importunity, should go dowm on its knees to her. As a woman of great taste will seek to have the details of her costume express an equalness of grade and quality, which secures harmony, so Nature, with faultless and exquisite judgment, arranges in like manner her evolutionary series through all the realms of matter and mind, proceeding always from the simple to the complex, from sameness to vari­ety, from the coarse to the fine, from the crude to the finished; and though an eon should be necessary to each grade in the series, yet shall the detail of each grade be held in perfect relation and keeping; for Nature is congruous whatever else she may be. There is due preparation for the advent of her successive creations or becomings, each of which waits on her fullness of time, and the longer the precedence of prepa­ration, the higher the outcome ranks in the scale of her series.

Who can guess how long the vegetable life waited on the trouble of chaos and the perturbations of protoplasm before cosmic propriety permitted the first lichen to drape the earth’s nudity? How long did the vegetable kingdom creepingly unfold as the expression of organized life before the animal creation put in an appearance and accepted all that had preceded it as a gratuitous offering to the animal economy? How long before man capped the climax of the vertebrate series in mathematical con­currence with the fullness of time and announced himself as monarch of all he sur­veyed? If he had tolerably good sense at the date of his appearance on this planet, he must have congratulated himself on the minutiae and perfecting of