THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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talk of his constitutional rights of property; but the constitution written by God on the hearts of men is the paramount law. We are told that the public sense of decency is offended by the appearance of processions of praying women on its streets. Eet it be offended. The public sense of decency always was and will be when the public vices and crimes are rebuked by plain truths spoken according to the Scriptures. Popular religion veils her decorous face, and pulls her skirts away, and fears that the cause of religion will suffer from such scandalous proceedings on the part of pious temperance men and women in the name of God. Poor thing! Let popular religion not be alarmed, for God is quite equal to the management of His own affairs.

This temperance movement is one of the deep throbbing movements of the human race; with unanimity and persistency, faith and prayer, on the part of the women of this land this huge evil can be dealt with as an offense against law and private morals.

I would ask you to sum up, if you can, the amount paid in a single day for drink alone. Now let the mind go out, extend the vision and the sum to all the cities, towns, villages, hamlets and waste places in the republic, and put the sum total in figures and multiply it by the days in the year, and you have a sum greater than the revenue of the United States Government. And paid for what? For that which is related to no good and which is wholly and utterly bad.

Add the yearly waste for drink of all the years of human life on this continent and, if the mind can carry it forward, estimate the cost of drink for all the years of modern Europe, and you reach a sum which can hardly find expression in words and figures.

Give me what is thus expended in fifty years, with wisdom to rightly use it, and what would I not do? I would feed and clothe, nurse and house every wretched child of wretched mortal man and woman on the broad earth. I would build up school- houses on all hillsides, in all the pleasant valleys, on all the smiling plains known to man. I would hire men to do good until they should fall in love with goodness. I would banish that nameless sin, for every female child should be placed above want and be made mistress of herself, to be approached only for her purity; and man should come to seek and love woman for that alone.

Drunkenness should be no more, for I would buy up the art and wish to produce that which could cause it, until the appetites and habits of men were healthy and pure. Men should be taught the science and art of self-government, and their labors and energies taxed alone for their self-good. Then, indeed, would fair opportunity come to all the sons and daughters of men unwarped and unfettered by starvation and want; uncrippled by crime and unstained by vice; with healthful, vigorous natures, pure desires and passions; with the broad, peaceful, beautiful earth opening its paths to their innocent feet without snares and pitfalls to go and do as they will.

This is a dream, you will say. I know it is. Such boundless wealth is not to be placed at the disposal of any mortal born, nor will mortal ever be endowed with such wisdom in its disposal. But could the fatal waste of these unknown millions of human beings at once and forever be stayed, and the little streamlets and drops of this waste turned and converted even to the ordinary means known to human advancement, my dream would be no longer a dream, but a hope of wondrous inspiration, leading the races of men to its happy realization, and then, and not until then, can we be foot free in God’s Country, America.