THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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life that is unaffected by the lack of proper development or individuality. The whole tendency of our civilization has been in the direction of making people as nearly as possible like other people. Characters of marked individuality are relegated to the class of so-called cranks. To be above the dead level of general sentiment and attain­ment is to be in decidedly bad form. This work of taking out of people the char­acteristics placed in them by nature, and making them over into the convenient and conventional types that think as others think, and do what others do, has marked our civilization from its earlier stages, and the more civilized we become the more pro­nounced are the results. Among these results are great loss of spiritual and mental vitality. It is time to call a halt, to change our methods, or to supplement them by methods of individual training. The beginning of such a work will mark an educa­tional era, the inception of which should not be longer delayed.

IDEAL MOTHERHOOD.

It only remains for the womanhood of this day, entering upon that broader, deeper motherhood, which makes of its heart a bulwark against whatever evils threat­en the young, to enter upon the study of childhood with half the energy and half the time she devotes in other directions, for this problem of individual education to find the first step in its solution, which first step, logically followed, will open all the rest. For it is woman alone through whom this change, as well as all changes requiring exercise of peculiar instinct and peculiar power, must come. In her ordinary efforts for the world’s betterment she counts too much upon outside aid, and too little upon her innate ability. She forgets the true measure of her power.

In most of her undertakings she instinctively guards against trespassing upon purely masculine fields, and shrinks from the opposition and disapproval of men. In this field of the study of childhood she has undisputed sway. By and by, as his life moves toward manhood, the father may claim his boy, but on all formative processes, that make that young manhood worth the father’s desiring, the mother has unques­tioned control. To know her child’s real inward life, his inherited tendencies, tastes, habits, temperament, temptations, aspirations, as she knows the outward facts of his existence, is not only her sacred privilege but her high obligation. To know herself in order that she may know her child, to know the processes and methods of instruction that educators offer, and to judge for herself whether they are suited to her own child’s nature is a task worthy of her noblest powers. We are busy with our provisions that the next generation of mothers shall be a generation that has a college training, a man’s knowledge of books. Only those of us who knew what it was to knock, and then to plead and then to batter at the brazen doors of prejudice that shut us out of college, while we clamored vainly for our right to the knowledge that was denied, know how rightly to estimate, rightly to encourage, rightly to rejoice that our coming mothers may enter freely as they will. But the world’s childhood should not wait for that next generation to rear its children by the help of better knowledge of books. The living book is open to the mother of today. The child is here, its young life ask­ing for bread upon which it can grow bravely up to the full stature of the perfect man. It asks for fish caught in our widespread nets of true knowledge, for fish in whose mouths shall be found the coin which they will need for the tax that life makes on every soul. How much of the hardness of heart think you in the manhood of today, how much of the slimy dishonor of our political life, how much of the wriggling inconsistency of character that marks men in high places, how much of the hiss and sting that awaits the highest endeavor and the noblest aspirations are due to the fact of a persistent diet of serpents and of stones? What then would we have? First, that women, mothers especially, who are becoming students of everything else under the sun, become students of childhood and students of every system, scheme, plan and practice for the development of the body, mind and character of the child. It is not more vital that the students of today shall make good mothers than that the mothers of today shall make students. It is the one thing of universal interest to the present,

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