THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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bodies unless the principle which they represent is of considerable moment to the general public.

A permanent Woman’s Building could not stand for a nobler or more practical aim, as one of its grand functions, than as the headquarters of a great system of state and international councils devoted to the temperate study of the condition of the women workers of the world. How long would it be before this vast educative influ­ence would result in striking from the statute book of every state in this Union laws inimical to the interests of women. How long would it be before the limitation of the hours of labor for both men and women would be a possible and constitutional enact­ment sustained by the consensus of public opinion, without which no law can become public practice. How long before the question of child labor, with all its attendant complications of compulsory education and manual training schools would receive active attention of legislators and rouse the supine interest of the mere sentimental theorist.

Truly there is the noblest, the most inspiring result to be anticipated if the women are now equal to the next step in human progress, made possible by the vantage ground they now occupy. If they neglect it or supply it, it may be twenty-five years before we regain the position. We are continually exhorted nowadays to be prepared for dangerous and wondrous changes to be wrought in the condition of society in the near future. It is one of the most curious fads of the time, this role of the Jeremiah of the economic system, and is a very convenient form of an attempt to shake off all present sense of personal responsibility for evils around, possibly in our power to alleviate. It is the role of the hopeless pessimist. Suppose it is the bad quarter of an hour. It is then the time for action. It is always the bad quarter of an hour, and has been from the beginning of time to those who recognize the necessity of reform of present evils. There always comes a time when education has performed its work and an advance in civil and ethical progress becomes a feasible attainment.

We are also told nowadays that the danger, should women attain actual political influence, is their tendency to introduce the ethics of the family with the ethics of the state; that it is the nature of women to confer benefits in proportion to the lack of merit of the recipient—that is, the more worthless the citizen the more she will do for him. A sort of application of the maternal instinct to care most assiduously for the worst of her children. This is not a special feminine weakness, but simply the impulse of sentimental misdirected and uneducated energy in both men and women. It arises from confounding that wise degree of care which the state must bestow upon its help­less, unfortunate or depraved classes with the injudicious use of governmental pro­tection and beneficience which becomes absolutely detrimental to the development and usefulness of the citizen by its paternal character.

Manual labor is not all the vital work of the world, though sentimental audiences clap their soft hands at the reiterated enunciation of this proposition on the part of professional agitators. While as a practical matter it is but a small proportion of humanity which does not daily do some share of manual labor, slight though it some­times may be; it is a preposterous proposition that actual physical exertion, to the extent of earning a subsistence, is the inherent obligation of each member of the human family. What a world of barbarians we would be! There are limitations to human endurance, though the brainwork which does so tremendous a share in the advance­ment of civilization is as exhausting labor as that of the purely physical. The only difference is that, as a general result, we find the physical laborer working under humane surroundings is granted a longer lease of life.

This deification of manual labor by half educated theorists is based upon crude notions of shortening hours by division. The uncertainty in the public mind, in that condition of society where intelligence is not general, as to the character of the obli­gation of government in this respect, is another reason for the false reasoning we meet so often. Hence, we find the attempt to revive the era of the complete artisan in an age when the spindle, the loom and the marvels of steam and iron fingers have all