THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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play with and pet the babies—to the great delight of the little ones, and their manifest improvement as well. To my mind, that was the sweetest thought that ever entered the heart of woman. And yet some folks think that women have no business to study or to practice medicine.

Next for babyland comes the care of the little toddling waifs in the free kinder­garten. The best physicians are not those who follow disease, but those who go ahead and prevent it. If the child is taught to be virtuous, self-governing, law-abiding, there will be no need to spend later years in re-formation. After nineteen centuries the “ little child ” still stands in our midst, and these loving mothers have taken him by the hand, and it is a pledge and prophecy of the coming of the blessed Master’s kingdom.

After this comes the kitchen garden, where neglected girls from tenement-house districts of our cities are gathered and taught the rudiments of an education, also cooking, sewing, housew'ork, and other means of making their homes brighter and better, or of making other homes pleasanter by becoming competent servants.

And for that great multitude, the poorest of all God’s poor, that innumerable and sorrowful company who, even in years which my memory can recall, were deemed utterly lost and hopeless, whose name must never be breathed by a good woman, and for whom it was almost a crime to pray—for these outlawed and wandering ones the nation’s motherhood has built the anchorage, the mission home, the refuge, the open door, wherein the best and brightest of these loving hearts preside, where the mother’s welcoming hand is always outstretched, and her sweet voice is calling, day by day and night by night, to the weakest, the guiltiest, the most despairing, the most desperate: “Come back, no matter how or from whence; here is home, here is mother, here is always ‘a light in the window for thee.’ ”

Dear sister woman, you who have been standing afar off, folding idle hands and sitting “ at ease in Zion,” do you feel no pulse of pity for the great multitude who live and weep and sin and suffer all around you? Do you see nothing helpful, noble, grand in this great band of organized motherhood? Can you with a clear conscience longer sit with folded hands, turn deaf ears to their pleadings, and refuse to come up to their help? “Your days vanish as a tale that is told;” the sun of your years hastens toward its going down. Oh, kindle your zeal at the altars of their glowing example; let your faith be firm, your courage strong, your love limitless! Awake, arise, and fight the good fight ere yet your sun has set, that you go not down to the dark valley with the blood of souls resting upon your head.

Mother, do you see the great multitude whom no man can number standing out­side the door of pity and protection with outstretched hands imploring help—the drunkard’s wife, the convict’s mother, the murderer’s child, the poor, the weak, the ignorant, the guilty? Day by day, hour by hour, they call you. Will you come up to their help? And when you have crossed the swelling river and the pearly gates swing open, will you miss the blare of trumpets or the clash of cymbals, if only there shall stand within that radiant gateway the familiar face of some poor, sin-stained woman, whose bleeding feet you once helped to climb the shining stair? Will you sigh for the golden vesture or the jeweled crown if she but hold out toil-worn, welcoming hands, and, smiling, say: “Come over the threshold?”

Among the manifold works and ways of the organized motherhood of this land not the least important, and, I am grieved to say, by no means the least painful and pitiful, has been that of petition and legislation. This being interpreted, reads: The mothers’ petitioning, and the fathers, in legislative hall convened, making of their peti­tions subjects for the amusement of the assembly. Nearly one-half the papers I pick up contain pointers on this subject. Should I try to use all I find I should be still talk­ing to you at the day of dawn of 1893, which wouldn’t be comfortable for you. So, leaving out all the rest, I take for illustration one near home. The issue of August 4 contains an account of a mothers’ meeting, from which I quote this para­graph: