THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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face the daylight since, lest his real weakness and his fraud should be discovered. Borrowed plumes are always dangerous. Mishaps are liable to intervene under such conditions. Too often the homely old proverb is illustrated, “ Up like a rocket and down like a stick.” Parchment wings are no better than the thin membrane of the bat; but to rely on our own resources, utilized by one’s self, means an unending increase of power.

I rejoice that women have not proved themselves to be pre-eminently given to that class of methods. But if no progressive woman would descend even in the least degree to these unworthy, pitiable, political but really most impolitic measures, the great cause of womanhood would be much more rapidly advanced, and in the end every woman would stand in her own true niche an honored, approved, wholly beau­tiful madonna of integrity.

Men and women are the whole earth’s rightful sovereigns by virtue of their intel­ligence and their higher appreciation of justice and equity. The physical forces wait their command, for it is intellect alone which can give them improved direction and control. The strength, the beauty, the grandeur of the world are the lawful servants and the inalienable possessions of all mankind. Many hued tiny blossoms and rich fruits, divinely tinted regal lands and skies gladden human lives. The tall firs, the white barked quivering aspens, the hearts of oak and the cedars of Lebanon are but precious gems often in a setting even richer than they. All these are for intelli­gent admiration, but equally for more prosaic human uses devised through ingenious re-adaptations. Mind alone can re-create a still nobler earth. But simple absolute truth to nature, physical and mental, is the charming method through which all desir­able transformations must be effected. As heat, light, and the power in steam and electricity can not be cajoled, cheated or defrauded, so neither can that in the far more admirable mental and moral forces. The intellectual and ethical worlds await transformations infinitely more glorious than can ever be realized in the physical domain. Women just entering upon their heritage of work in that wider field which is privileged to merge self-interest in the broader welfare of progressive humanity, are not destined to become the simple imitators of our brothers, even as to their best methods—certainly not as to their worst. Imitation is the genius of commonplace; it proclaims its own insufficiency, its poor mediocrity, Imitation has a tone, a puerile side to even its best attempts. As womanhood is not a copy of manhood but its correlate, so the ways and means of the women who become world-workers are not to be the dimmer repeated impressions of the ways and means of the world-workers among men. The monkey, like a good many queer plants and many still more odd and curious animals, is certainly one of the numberless creative jokes. They all illus­trate the desirability of humor, the wholesome sense of fun and enjoyment to enliven the earnest realities of life. They serve to impress the lesson that a laugh may be quite as healthful as a tear. The monkeys, whimsical caricatures of human beings, have imitation as their leading characteristic mentally. They are the best illustrations we have of the very low plane upon which we must place all pure imitation of every degree. The blundering attempt to do what some one else has done well is often deliciously absurd, and so far good as laughter provoking. It has its uses when imitation is made a light, practical gymnastics; but one can almost fancy a leading intention in making the monkey the standing illustration to enforce the imbecility of all serious mimicry of others. Young children are mimics of course; but to women, it is both a right and a duty to express their own individuality and every woman should aim to express something of her own ideal character in her work. She can realize her best self in her occupations very much as a novelist writes himself into the treatment of his characters. He may do this voluntarily; he is impelled to do it involuntarily. In the same way the life work of every woman becomes a revelation of herself and should be made to represent the highest ideal, womanly self. In the beginning God made male and female. Granite mountains joining their leagues of cold, rocky hands, but lifting white crowned heads upward toward light and sunshine in all their grandeur, are not