THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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Agriculture and Commerce, greatness was shown in the discovery of new lands, fruits palatable, grains nutritious, and in the power of the will to direct energy to useful ends, to plow and plant, to save and sell, to make fruitful Earth serve the will and wish of the human mind; with them the great woman was one who had found a new grain that could be utilized for food of people that they might not be compelled to be marauding tribes, stealing cattle from other tribes for food. The mothers in council learned howto feed with grain their people quietly, peacefully, and gradually to work into the nerve of children and youth strength and reason, and thus check the raven­ous dispositions and the roving, stealthy habits that always go with those who herd cattle, and are eaters of blood and sinew, the habits of patriarchs, and the people they herd and were shepherds of. The great women, mothers of commerce, of agriculture, of trade and ingenious workmanship, compared good with evil, and aspired to become self-directing, co-working with Creation and its laws. The same idea animates the highest civilization to-day, and it is our duty to find who the women were who helped to bring it about.

The methods for our enlightened life today were those of the great mothers in council, who were drawn by sympathy to help one another in distress, in sickness, at harvest, and in journeys for trade, not to slay or steal from other tribes, but to learn to exchange baskets for pots, minerals, shells and fiber to make into raiment. The great women of antiquity are those who aided the human mind to distinguish good from evil, and through habits of industry curb the powers of passion, and tame force and strength to serve the tribe under the direction of reason. She was great who could think some thought, do some deed to add to the experience of the world, to aid the next generation of women so they could be sure of a permanent home, sure of food and raiment and ability to make something to sell. The great souls were not the strong forces that destroyed enemies or beasts, but the inventive souls, the intuitive minds that circumvented evils, that brought positive good to a people. How? Not by conquering a neighbor and securing booty in land and cattle, but those who trained families to supply their own wants by work, to have an aim in life, to so order their ways that they could be imitated with advantage to the whole tribe; thus mankind could become by habit civilized, that is, to work together by free choice, that the work of each should be good for all. It is women who have brought these ideals into human life. Women have not been visionary but practical, unless the having a high ideal and working for a future better than the present can appreciate is visionary.

There is an irrepressible conflict between the patriarchal idea of greatness and the matriarchal. Since the re-discovery of the Western continent by Western Europeans four hundred years ago, and the discovery that the sphere was balanced by its own motion, and this motion intimately connected with life thereon, then began changes in governments and in religions, from the patriarchal to the matriarchal methods, and the laws of earth and woman have been honored. Woman began to be recognized as a sphere in society, gaining equilibrium, too, by her own reason and her motion of mind, and that intimately connected with her movement of mind was the equilibrium of society. The literature of Greece was revived because the methods, the principles, the ideals of goddesses, the matriarchal ideals, were to come forth in power to shape and direct the New World era And this republic is the result of matriarchal not patri­archal methods of life and in ideals. This is the influence we inherit. Have we knowledge to understand it?

Histories heretofore have been written by men; Scriptures preserved by the high priests, the Druids, the patriarchs; reprinted and upheld by empires, religious and political. The true history of human progress from savagehood to enlightened civil life is yet to be written. Not till the spirit of archaeology, philology and folk-lore was awakened did we have the material facts to reason from. Now, here, in the center of the oldest continent, we find Scripture fulfilled, and the last continent is found to be the first, and the rejected stones of the early Americans are to become the corner­stones of human history.