THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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detail which delayed his coming. It is ever the last result which utilizes and epitomizes preceding effects. The richer the macrocosm the grander the microcosm. Man found himself invested with aptitudes and characteristics in perfect keeping with his habitat. Convulsive throes of Nature, gigantic powers of vegetation, hugeness and antagonism in the brute creation, heralded and attended Man the militant, Man the conqueror; and these in turn gave place to more ' intricate expressions of Nature, as Man the subjugator became Man the social being. Wonderful utilities did he wrest from the close clutches of Nature by strength of muscle and mind, and he named the ages after them, as he builded communities, kingdoms and nations along his militant path; and he said, “the stone age served me here and iron there, yet surely some individuality other than my own must sooner or later co-operate with me in the economy of things, or Man will become an incongruity, an anachronism, not able to keep pace with the increasing complexity of society and its moral needs.

All things herald finer citizenship. “My good sword rusts in its scabbard for lack of use, for the press age has transferred the arena of battle to the realm of ideas. The good fellowship also of the steam age, introduced by the genius of commerce, renders it no longer appropriate for the spirit of forceful antagonism to dominate the nations.” Man, urged on by the “ power that makes for righteousness,” advanced into the tangle of civilization, like Father Salvierderra into the wild mustard maize. But Ramona was not there. Not yet the fullness of time. And had he dreamed that far away in the distance she was patiently parting the thicket that she might join him in the advance, he would surely have cried “halt!”

A new age, shod with lightning, has overtaken man’s bewilderment. Its incan­descent fire reveals the occult forces of nature, the eluding principle of things, and the material reservoirs of power. And, lo! Ramona is here, standing clear in the white light of the electric age, as the new factor in economics. The magnitude of the prep­aration has been fully proportioned to the ripe event. For woman, the magic of events has transformed obstacle and hindrance into those necessary equipments of character which belong not to partial but complete citizenship. What does this equipment for complete citizenship indicate? It is no superfluous trick of evolution, mark my words. Desired or dreaded, woman is proceeding straight to the inevitable goal of largest social and political equality. We might as well endeavor to avert the fact that we were born as this fact. We are under equal necessity to resignedly utilize the one as the other of these facts. Industrial emancipation broadens by an inevitable law into social and political equality, and as the combined forces of the stone, iron, press and steam ages were engaged in shaping and molding civilization into fitness for woman’s economic co-operation, so, far back in the mist of ages, the genius of religion and government began the preparatory work of her final debut as the full complement of man.

Old Thor strove with giants until, in the twilight of the gods, his hammer returned to him to be hurled no more. Jupiter, the weather-clearer, moved heaven and earth, swayed the tides of battle, and fostered in the hearts of men the ideas of law, justice and order, until he, too, sat frozen on his Olympian throne. Hermes, as he crossed the horizon of man’s superstitious belief, scattered science and music in his flight, and passed to the paradise of the Egyptian gods. Brahma existed to abolish desire and initiate the human soul into the salvation of continued patience. Buddha, through contemplation and suffering, conquered the secret of deliverance for the human spirit as his bequest to the race. Confucius came, bearing reverently his system of moral philosophy, and dropped it into the world’s ethical caldron; and, later, the carpenter’s 8on, poor, unlettered, filial, yet transcending at need all ills of earth and flesh, all schools, all human institutions—Jesus—stood upon the Mount of Olives and gave briefly to the world the full redeeming utterance of love, revealing the way, the truth, and the life, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of the race.

Note the long process of ethical and religious culture filtering and refining through all the ages up to this present date of the Columbian Exposition; and, in the name of