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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

search into the dark alleys of the moral, ethical and religious world; into all the varied slums of human thought; they hint, in short, at a new civilization, a new man.

Great art is moral and religious in its teachings and has ever been. Beethoven said: “ All genuine invention is a moral progress.” What we acquire through art is from God, a divine suggestion that sets up a goal for human capacities which the spirit attains. He said also: “ We do not know what grants us our knowledge. The firmly enclosed seed needs the moist, warm, electric soil to grow, think, express itself.” Why, my friends, it is an education to walk through these grounds, among these columns, to pass under these domes, an education which we cannot estimate. It imposes a quietude, a courtesy, a gentle awe of which we do not know the meaning. We feel it, that is all. We bear away a new sense of humanity, of the brotherhood of man, that we never felt before. These grounds are the birthplace of a new democracy, of a deeper, more spiritual understanding of the first principles of our declaration of inde­pendence, I believe, than anything that has gone before has given us. The “ self evident truth that all men are created free and equal, with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” here takes on a new meaning, assumes a farther reach. Caste, cannot live here.

My friends, in looking over this wondrous Exposition, the marvelous achieve­ments of the arts and inventiveness of man, a new light has seemed to come upon this lesson of the old Sphinx, as good for our day as it was for the pre-Adamites; as good in science as in art, and the same in both as in morals and religion. There is but one law.

Was there ever such a paean, such a divine symphony of art and science, intoning through ten thousand times ten thousand voices, this inspired psalm of the old Sphinx as this World’s Fair? “ There shall never be one lost good or one lost truth.” Never have I felt such exultation as here—that a new heaven and a new earth await us, when the knowledge that has been grasped by science shall be realized as a whole, related to that which is within us as to that which is external to us—that there is but one law. Surely the philosopher’s stone is found here ? The lesson comes to us like the sound of many waters in the buzz and hum and roar from Machinery Hall, the Electrical and Manu­factures Building, revealing to us that human possibilities undreamed of, until within the last quarter, or the last decade of our century, are in us all, and forces of nature, hitherto undreamed of, are subject to man’s knowledge and in his control, impressing upon us as nothing else ever did, that, “verily the Highest dwells in us” and “that we are gods but in the germ.” As I read the lessons of this Fair which has brought all nations together as never before; there has never in the world’s history been taken a more important step toward effecting this, or bringing about this time, than was taken in the organization of this World’s Fair with its Auxiliary Congresses Truly in this, men have builded better than they knew.

Again, what a lesson of the universality of law, written as on a Bible page before us, in all these facts of applied science. Law, sacred, inviolable but with incalculable harm to the violator, be it man or thing—law governing everything, from the infinitesi­mal atoms, millions of which are massed in a single dewdrop, to the invisible electric bolt that glides harmless and noiseless along its law-abiding path to its destined end, but transcending its limitations by the millionth part of one of the scintillating atoms in the dewdrop, it might in the thousandth part of a second, shatter to atoms the fairest structure in this city of the sciences and art.

These Auxiliary Congresses, taking for their motto “Not matter but mind, ” sug­gest that there are suitable forces analagous to those already discovered, but greater than those of which we yet know, which will be sought out through suggestions here made to the great discoverers of our age in realms of mind, morals, spirit, beyond those yet explored. Says the greatest seer of our age: “ We do not yet half possess ourselves.” But he also adds; “ By every throe of growth the man expands there where he works.” This is the key to growth. If we had learned nothing else than this, that through work is growth, this World’s Fair would have been a rewardful out-