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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

the universal law of correspondence, mark the prestige it lends to woman, the new factor in economics, and the warranty it establishes for her final emancipation into all the efificiences and prerogatives of free citizenship. When that fruition arrives, when man and woman—the dual unity of the race—are equal partners in directing the forces of social destiny, we might almost imagine and believe that the material king­dom also may become transformed into joyous correspondence with the loving equity of the human world; that the serpent’s venom and the insect’s sting, the earthquake’s mumbling threat and the direful sweep of the tornado’s wing, will no longer find place in nature’s record. Note also, that, parallel with the transformations in religious and ethical ideas which antedated woman’s economic debut, have been the change in forms of government and social institutious. A beast of prey the primitive man rose to nomadic forms of culture, patriarchs gave place to kings and emperors, these in turn to constitutional monarchy, and this slowly to the democratic idea and the rights of man. The bloody track of governmental evolution, conspicuous with the panoply of war, was built upon fallen thrones and devastated dynasties, the sentiment of patriotism broadening, in the red struggle, from the family to the nation.

And woman—waited! Not yet the fullness of time for her awakening to the world’s need of her citizenship. Something more of brute crudity must be eliminated from the tumultuous forces of civilization. Some broader conception of human life and its universal relations must modify the world’s ferment ere woman would arise from her world-old, hypnotic trance to a realizing sense of her individual ability and power, and the need of her taking an equal hand with man in working out a universal order. The ages had thundered from the date of chaos, and she had not awakened. But there came a noiseless, white-winged thought into the human atmosphere, and woman arose and stood upon her feet, and knew herself, and the world’s need, and this was the white-winged thought: ‘'There is but one life and humanity is its spiritual image.”

As the genius of the springtide sets all the forces of nature in sweetest passion for expression, so does this thought quicken the hearts of men and women into a mania to make the material interests of the entire humanity correspond to this spiritual fact. To a no less work than this is woman called and awakened: to convert discord into harmony, rivalry into emulation, jealousy into magnanimity, competition into co-operation, pov­erty into comfort, and the love of money into the love of man. Need I say that such a transformation of the motives of human action—slow, silent, invisible—must sooner or later work out a system of society and government in which each shall stand for all and all for each. It is but a question of time. The century plant that waits a hundred years for its life’s fulfillment is no less certain of its final glory than the convolvulus that greets the dawn with expanded petals.

There is no uncertainty in the eternal goodness, and the inevitable advance of woman into all the lines of free citizenship is but a part of “that Divine event to which a whole creation moves.”