THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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thought, faith and love combine to stir up activity, and she answers: “ Behold, I am here to serve! ” It is this woman to whom I speak today, asking that American women recognize a common motherhood and a common sisterhood, that what is claimed as justice for one may be justice for all; that in the distribution of love, and the gifts of love, the Southern girl has equal recognition with her sister. She is of large brain, of pure soul, of clean hands and of your own blood; flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. Trebly bereft by the desolations of war, she has yet actively and consci­ously recognized the force of noblesse oblige. Leisure and wealth gave to her grand­mother an exquisite culture. Planter princes lavished fortunes upon the women who were to be the dispensers of royal hospitality that “ neither condescended nor cringed.”

The heritage of their daughters has been poverty, but not humiliation, nor even defeat, except the defeat of which success is born. From the ashes of the wreck they came into their kingdom of strength and holiness. All over that beautiful land they are nurse, teacher, home-tender, mother—sweet, wise and gracious. They are strong, self-reliant, independent. They ask nothing for themselves, and if I ask in their behalf, it is of those upon whom they have the claim of sisterhood. Schools are on the hillsides and on the plains, good as the best of their kind, for white and colored alike. Do not heed him or her who tells you that we do not provide for the educa­tion of our colored people. The fund is a common one, and provision is made in the public school for every boy and girl, white or black. The burden is heavy, but the people have borne it without a murmur. Along the line of primary, secondary, high school and academic instruction, all is well and growing daily better, but we have no Smith, no Vassar, no Wellesley, no Holyoke, no Bryn Mawr. This means that private endowment does not reach us. Our own people are not rich in material things, and others are unmindful or forgetful. This is the claim I present today, not as a demand, but with a strong, earnest appeal to the spirit of a large-hearted sisterhood, which has planted the College Beautiful on so many Northern hillsides. Our girls must go far from home for a broad and generous college culture, or they must do without. Unfortunately, by far the larger majority cannot leave home by reason of limitations that are apparent, and yet these noble-minded girls are the ones to whom this train­ing is an absolute essential. This is not in accordance with the American spirit. Our Mother Columbia does not mean to say to her large family of beautiful daughters: “One-half may have all the joys and blessings of the higher education; the other half must take the lower, or nothing.”

It requires no prophetic vision to see the meaning of this waste to the higher American life of the future; not to read the story of limitation to the universal cause of womanhood, if we are not at once active in removing hindrances. There are more pathetic tragedies than those of Teutonic battlefields, and first among them, surely, is the disappointment of young hopes. “Today the morning is noisy with birds,” tomorrow they may be old and silent. Let us look for effective rather than final causes; and in seeking to find God everywhere, let us not be afraid to acknowledge the value of national agencies, or to set forces to work that will help God redeem the world. Let one of these be a college at the South for our girls, so magnificently endowed with such bountiful provision for student aid that no good girl in search of an education will be turned away. It should combine all the requirements of the best discipline and instruction. Its foundation should be laid in the thorough training of English according to the most approved methods. There should be a department of domestic economy, so well equipped that every graduate of the college might be pre­pared, not only for housekeeping, but for home-keeping. Thus shall we express our faith, not only in an overruling Providence, but, as Charles Kingsley says, in an under­ruling, around-ruling, and an in-ruling Providence, from whose inspiration comes all true thought, all true feeling. Every hope is the beginning of its own fulfillment, saysourdear Emerson; and as we walk out into the grounds today, let the out-door air sweep in the vision I have sketched. Columbia, thou hast battlements of mountain treasure, caves