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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
weariness of pleasure provided, over which they had no sway. Adam saw not this serpent, this charmer, that wooed beyond the gates of brute-inhabited Eden; it was Eve who in turn tempted him. And who can gainsay that, had she not first tasted and then given to Adam, there might now be but a race of satyrs frisking over the earth.
The ancient Greeks were not slow to recognize the due weight of woman’s influence, for in their Pantheon male and female rule conjointly over the world. But mark the nice distinction they make! To the gods are given all physical power, to the goddesses all intellectual. Minerva is the living essence of Jove’s brain, for she literally was born of his head. And through this belief to what excellence in war, and song, and art, and virtue, did men not attain? Perceive the contrast in countries where the female mind is ignored. Look at emasculated Turkey and shriveled Arabia. How far the association of a female in the Christian religion has exercised a humanizing effect “ he who runs may read.” The co-ordination of woman with man in the laws of the Hebrews has given them that vitality which day by day impresses mankind with the conviction of their immortal truth.
It would be too sweeping an assertion to say that all great men only attain their eminence through the influence of woman. Poets and musicians receive their gifts direct from the great Creator. Genius is a self-feeding flame, kindled from within; it does not borrow fuel. And yet, would Petrarch ever have been bonneted had he not so sonneted his Laura? And while Virgil dragged Dante down to- hell, it was Beatrice who lifted him up to Paradise. Everyone knows that Madame de Maintenon forged the glittering rays in which Louis XIV. shone so grandly. Queen Bess was the female Vulcan, who with all her brusquerie hammered out her own “ Golden Age” of poets and statesmen and navigators. A woman’s finer sensibilities and foresight compassed the way to America. And what is called today “ the best government under the sun” hails a woman at the helm. How much the abrogation of the Salic law in monarchial France might have lessened the causes that made it volcanic in its eruption of fiery, devastating hate, succeeding generations will pronounce; and whether the stepping of our own government on the downward grade is to be arrested by woman suffrage remains also to be demonstrated.
In the early days of American independence many famous men wore their laurels more gracefully that the wreatji was reflected also on the wifely brow. Mrs. John Adams quietly upheld her husband’s dignity during his ministerial absence, and •enhanced it when the demands of his position elicited her ability thereto. Mrs. John Jay added brighter luster to the name of her liege lord. Mrs. William Bingham was the admired lady, at home and abroad, who gave tone to the sex of her country. And surely the memory of Washington’s mother and wife descends to us with their own halos of virtue and noble simplicity, contributing somewhat toward the glorious light in which shines the “ Father of his Country.”
As the whole machinery of a watch without the small, delicate, almost unseen mainspring is useless, so does the whole machinery of the terrestrial world require somewhere the delicate, unseen influence of woman. Her care or neglect protects or endangers mankind through the evil or the virtue that she propagates, and her subsequent fostering of it; while her individual character is Parcaean in its fiats. The unfaithfulness of a Helen plunged almost a world into war; the chastity of a Lucretia transformed a kingdom into a republic; the compassion and equity of Harriet Beecher Stowe unbound the fetters of a nation of slaves and led them into the sunlight of freedom. There is in the temperament of woman that which makes for weal or woe;' the question is how best to dispose of it.
I am not prepared to say that the mere concession to woman of the privilege to cast her vote will purge all governments of corruption and establish a Platonian republic, unless such restrictions could be imposed that only the most intelligent and unbiased of her sex could be eligible, but in this country the wild scuffle for office to subvention it to private ends has so become the “tramp! tramp! ” of the nation’s march, that there is danger of the women too following this “ Pied Piper of Hamelin.”