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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

ticuiar who do hold office.” Women are more temperate than men; yet when the state has a temperance question to settle, the ballot is placed in the hands of every distiller, every brewer, every saloonkeeper, every bartender and every male drunkard, and is kept out of the hands of the women, the great temperance factor of the world, which, to our intuitive natures, is a mark of very poor statesmanship. Women are also more religious than men; nearly three-fourths of the church members are women, and nine-tenths of the spiritual and philanthropic work of the world is done by them. Yet when it comes to building up the life of a republic this spiritual factor is counted out. And this men call statesmanship. It is charged that women, if possessed of political power, would seek to unite church and state. This statement is wholly with­out foundation; knowing as we do that such a union would be disastrous to both church and state, women would oppose it even more than men. Yet we answer the gentle­man who claimed that, ‘‘there is no place in the politics of this country for the deca­logue and the golden rule,” that if it be true, then there is no place in God’s universe for the politics of this country. He has no place for the politics of any country in which there is no room for the decalogue or the golden rule. What we need more than the settlement of any of the problems which are at present agitating the political mind is an infusion of the golden rule into politics, and of the decalogue into the laws of the land. This cannot be accomplished either by putting the name of Deity into the Constitution, or by the union of church and state, but by bringing to bear upon the government the influence of that class of people who are the spiritual strength of the church.

Again, women are more peace-loving than men. This has led some to say that women ought not to vote because they cannot bear arms This claim is usually made by men who, in the hour of their country’s need, sent substitutes to the army, or fled to Canada; or else, by the young men who have been born since the close of the war. The class who never make the statement that the ballot and the bayonet go together, are the heroes maimed in battle or broken in health, and prematurely old because of exposure and suffering in their country’s behalf. They know the value of women in war time, and that women do go to war. Had it not been for the forty thousand women who went to the hospitals, visited the camps and battle-fields to care for our wounded heroes, there are thousands with us today who would never have seen home or friends again, but who would be sleeping in unknown graves. These heroes remember not only the services of the women in the field, but the great sanitary com­mission, sending its millions of dollars’ worth of those things which were made for health and comfort, to hospital and fields during those terrible years of suffering. But, best of all, they remember the Grand Army of the Republic that staid at home, who, when the citizen soldiers laid down the implements of peace, to take up the weapons of war, took those implements of peace and went to the workshop, the factory, the counting-room, the store and the farm, filling the places of men and earning the live­lihood for the family, when prices were such as had never been known in the histore of our time; and when the news came flashing over the wire that they who had gone forth w T ould never more return, the broken-hearted wives, forgetting the agony of their own loss, gathered their children about their knees, and asked God that they might be both father and mother to their fatherless little ones; and alone and single-handed all over the land women have reared to manhood and womanhood the children left by their dead heroes as their only legacy. Then some man who never struck a blow in behalf of his country exclaims: “Women must not vote, because they cannot fight.” In the face of the loyalty of America’s Womanhood the darkest stain on the escutcheon of our country is its utter forgetfulness of their services. From the begin­ning of its history to the present hour, by no act of Congress or of any state legislat­ure has there ever been any public recognition of the services of its women. By no monument of granite, or marble, or bronze has it ever commemorated the memory of their patriotism. They are as utterly forgotten as if they had never lived, suffered or died for their country.