THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
751
month for the merest pittance of starvation wages—ask the sad-eyed mother who watches her roses fade and her young strength fail, who knows the terrible temptations that daily beset her in that unequal race—ask her if, in pleading to be made a member of a representative, not a silent and subject class, she is asking for—“she knows not what.” Ask that widowed mother, whose ceaseless “ stitch, stitch, stitch” from day- dawn till midnight scarcely provides the coarsest and commonest food and shelter for herself and her little girl, who knows that after her tenth birthday no law stands between that baby-girl and the devouring wolf of legalized sensuality—ask that anxious heart if, when she prays for the day when she shall hold in her hand the only weapon with which she can protect that child she is sending up vain, ignorant petitions to a merciful Father pleading for—“she knows not what.”
We read in olden story how a Scottish leader inclosed the heart of the hero of Bannockburn in a silver casket, and hurled it into the ranks of the enemy, that his devoted followers might rush after it with the instinctive battle-cry: “ Heart of Bruce! I follow thee! ”
Brothers! not the dead senseless ashes inclosed in silver shrine, but the living, bleeding, breaking heart of American motherhood lies trodden under foot in the ranks of the enemy. The chords that vibrated to sweetest melody when the eyes of her first-born son, the hope of her heart and house, smiled up into hers, lies torn and bleeding under the relentless tread of the legalized liquor traffic. The strings that were twined with a life and death clasp around the life and destiny of her little baby girl lie crushed and quivering in the devouring jaws of legalized and law-protected sensuality. The ebbing life blood oozes, drop by drop, as her fair young daughter, hounded on by the pursuing fiends of ill-paid labor, treachery and starvation, plunges over the fatal precipice and is lost in the black, fathomless abyss of moral and social degradation and death.
And as of old that Scottish leader stood, so stand I here today; and I call upon you, friends! brothers! fellow soldiers! knights of the nineteenth century! Let your battle-cry ring out so loud and clear that all the world shall hear it: “Mother heart! I follow thee! ”