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THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.

have the protective power of women organized in friendly societies to succor young and. exposed women seeking work in strange places; in associations which aim to guard those solitary children and women whom God has not set in families; in indus­trial and educational unions which aim to surround the less favored feminine life of great cities with the dignity, the power, the uplifting self-respect which the best and strongest womanhood displays; and we have the moral conservatism of women organized. We have the wonderful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, with its temperance center and its ever-widening circumference of purification and moral growth in almost all directions of woman’s power. And last, we have the new move­ment which, like the charity organizations, aims to make a synthesis of those analyzed specialties. We have the movement toward a national and international conference of women which shall leave each smallest club and most insignificant association free to do its work in its own way, but link all together in an army where weakness shall gather strength, ignorance shall gather wisdom, bigotry shall gather tolerance, and selfish exclusion shall gather world sympathy, by the elbow touch of a common aim to grow freely toward goodness and truth, and give generously what is received from the universe to the world’s poorer souls and bodies. I look upon this latest move­ment among women inaugurated in that wonderful Washington meeting as the finest flower of woman’s special organization.

We have traced the history of woman’s organization for specific development of power, private and social, back to its germ in the religious call to a personal consecra­tion. We have traced it by hints through its era of self-assertion of the great few, which self-assertion we find, even in its coarsest and most selfish aspects, has contrib­uted mightily to the inherited freedom and individual power of the modern woman.

This all means what? In brief this: When woman found herself, when she began to learn that she was a person and not merely a passive conveyor of personality from generation to generation, she began to see also two other things; not clearly at first, but little by little has her sight come in these two great lines. The first thing woman began to see was that, being a person as man is a person, being herself an individual and not merely a purveyor to the individuality of men, she had both a right and a duty to intrepret her own nature and grow according to the law written in her own being. This meant freedom to learn for herself, freedom to outline her own powers and uses. This meant again resistance to such crippling laws and conditions as forbade free expansion. This meant again, do you not see, the joining together of such isolated women as had come to self-knowledge and self-respecting love of free­dom, in order that these crippling laws and conditions might be more successfully resisted, and these opportunities for growth and self-development might be increased, as single effort was powerless to increase them. You can have no esprit de corps among slaves who are slaves in spirit. It is only when they are united in a common impulse toward freedom that they can depend upon one another for support. So long as they look for personal advantage in slavery they are treacherous, and know no loyalty save to their masters. So of women, until they had come to a time when they looked not to manhood for reflected power and conferred privilege, but to their own womanhood for patent of their own nobility, they could not work together.

Men have an easy comradeship which does not strike deep; they have a free and happy ignoring of little differences in opinion and taste which it is the first duty of large-minded women to imitate; they have a breadth of view, a sense of proportion in working together for special ends which conscientious, fastidious women must emulate, if they are to do some of the things they wish to undertake.

The first joining of hands of gifted women for mutual improvement was along religious lines and generally within church bonds. But when neighborhood meeting grew to the city club, the local church gathering to the county conference, and these both grew again to the state or national association, women’s organization also en­larged. Nor will we forget the second insight which came to woman with awakening individuality. Not only did it become increasingly clear to her that being a person as