THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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God does not send sons into one family and daughters into another. He sends them together to grow up in peace and love around one hearth, and to help, not to defraud, each other in after life. Society, however, as man has made it, consistently tries to forget the lessons of Christianity. It deals out very different punishments for the sister and the brother. His sins are “ wild oats,” errors of youth, and, if continued into age, a man’s mistakes; but hers are crimes from the first, and no life of penitence can ever wash away the stain.

I advocate the complete freedom of the woman, because I foresee in the coming education of the masses she will need all her freedom to preserve her best interests and the best interests of the home and family. If I have read history aright, I have learned this lesson from it, that my sex has not received justice from her brother always because of his superior knowledge.

If you are familiar with Greek life as it is given to us in Homer, you are aware that woman, though from our standard she was in a barbarous position, yet she was far higher than she was four centuries after in the time of Plato. Yet during those four centuries the Greeks had made a wonderful advancement. Plato, whose mind and genius were of the greatest that ever existed, saw through the thick veil of prejudice and wrong that shrouded one-half of the human race. He saw what the wise have always seen: that the highest human effort was held back by the degradation of women.

We know that the Spartans were inferior to the Athenians in all the arts and refined accomplishments; yet the Spartan women possessed far more influence than those of Athens. If you read Euripides you will understand the scorn with which the philoso­phers of Athens regarded their wives and sisters. Women then despised the freedom they were denied, as many despise it now. A Greek woman taunted her rival that she wanted to be like a man, and go in through the front door of a house. Under our old regime "free nigger” was the greatest term of reproach, but when emancipation came, which of the scoffers remained in bondage?

Mr. Horace Platt, an able lawyer of San Francisco, in an address of much research, recently, dwelt on the gloomy picture of law as it dealt with us in ancient times. Yet the greatest monument that has comedown to us from the Roman Empire is her jurisprudence. Our laws are simply copied from it. Mr. Platt did not tell us, however, that many of the worst laws of England and Germany against women were added after the Reformation. Many of the old brutal statutes that had well-nigh died out under the influence of chivalry were again revived against her. He told us there was one later Roman enactment in favor of women holding property that was in oper­ation when California was a Mexican province. Our state adopted this law into its code and we have the advantage of it. Mr. Platt did not tell us, however, how the Roman women wrested this law from their masters. He did not tell us how they held meetings, made speeches, and pushed themselves into the Senate Chamber to resist the infamous decrees that had culminated in one, that no daughter should inherit either property or money from the family. About the year 600 there lived in Rome Anius Ansellus.* He had acquired a large fortune in trade. He had only one child, a daughter, whom he idolized. His great wealth had only one value for him, that it should enrich his daughter; yet he knew that according to law she could not inherit it.

Roman citizens were divided into six classes. Five of these classes paid taxes. The sixth class were people too poor to own property, and were excluded from all political rights. They were the middle class, between the freeman and the slave, the citizen and the alien. To belong to this class was to be degraded, yet the law, as if in fine sarcasm, allowed its fathers to leave all their effects to their daughters. Ansellus, because of his great love for his child, renounced every privilege dear to the heart of a Roman, and publicly enrolled himself in this class. He gave up every honor in his own life to baffle the cruel injustice of his country, and leave his large fortune to his daughter.

Mr. Platt had sought for no such illustration as the story of Ansellus. In telling

*La Cause de la Manumission des Femmes.