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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

of universal importance to the future of the individual, of the nation, of the race, that the women of today accept as their divine responsibility the childhood of today. If it were not that the world is sated with societies, one might plead for the advantage, in every village of the land, of organized study of everything that pertains to the out­ward and inward welfare of the young. There is already a psychological movement in this direction which must necessarily be limited in its scope. We need something broader, more general. A children’s building in every large center of our land, includ­ing all that this one of the Exposition has, and much that this has not, should be the one result of such interest as such a society would arouse.

Any number of women united with the purpose to know for themselves whatever things are being taught to their own children, beginning with the kindergarten and the multiplication table, would not only find their own minds quickened and alert, but be in a condition to discriminate as to the value of instruction and its adaptation to real needs, but moving on step by step with the child, could, by no greater exercise of their matured powers than they make in other directions, often secure the college education denied to so many of us in our youth.

Not least among the advantages of such study would be the fact that the wide separation which the college life and the student too often make between the heart of mother and son might be avoided. The lad no longer leaves his mother behind because he enters fields of knowledge where she may never hope to go, because he is now finding his place among the stars, and she, from the threshold of home, can only hope to catch a glimmer of his light in the multitudinous sparkle of the sky.

I am not unmindful of the objections that arise to the mind already accustomed to the idea of seeing even their own children grow up and out and away into a life the mother can only follow and share through her affections, her prayers. “ There is no time for study,” they say; but the Shakespeare Club and Browning Club, and the social world and the Missionary Society, and the Daughters of the Revolution and the household, and the-father of the children—there is time for all; and yet how the flavor of it all turns to ashes on the lips when the boy, our boy, comes to belong to the world or to the wine, or to the life that is not life but death, and so is no more our own. In the bitterness of such hours mothers speak the truth, if the anguish is not too deep for any speech. “No one knew him as I knew him,” they say; “he ought to have had this influence and that guidance and that help along the way which no one supplied because no one understood him as his mother did.” And that utter­ance is the very truth of God concerning the motherhood and childhood of today. No one knows them as we know them, and no one should and no one can, and, know­ing through our hearts what they are and what they need, it is for us to so strengthen the life of knowledge and of thought that we shall walk beside them all the way, strengthening all influences that may avail for their good, that the true education may result in such citizens and patriots, such men and women, as we shall be proud to call our daughters and our sons. We plead, therefore, for the education of every child in accordance with his individual nature and needs, and for the education of the mother of today that she may be able to secure this individual teaching for the child who in the tomorrow shall become the best interpreter and the highest expression of her pos­sibilities and powers.