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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

If the privileges now afforded to women shall lead them to more realistic views in regard to the affections, incalculable results for good must in eviably follow; for there is no truth that men and women need to see more plainly than the fact* that the emotions and the affections are to be kept under wise control, and they are of value only as they are under control, and that the infallibility of love is not in proportion to its intensity, but rather in proportion to its clearsightedness. How plainly Dante saw this truth, and how firmly he was guided by it is evident from what he says in the “Vita Nuova,” after describing his first meeting with Beatrice: “ I say that from that time love quite governed my soul, and with so safe and undisputed lordship that I had nothing left for it but to do all his bidding continually. And albeit her image that was with me always was an exaltation of love to subdue me, it was yet of so perfect a quality that it never allowed me to be overruled by love without the faithful counsel of reason whensoever such counsel was useful to be heard.” I know the tendency of women is to live in their feelings; still this tendency need not be abnormally culti­vated, as it has been in times past, and above all things this emotional state should not be considered the ideal condition for woman, for in whatever way we may regard woman, whether as an individual of and for herself, or whether we regard her as a helpmate for man, in either case it is the rational life that gives a permanent worth to the emotional life. Desirable and indispensable as the latter may be, its best signifi­cance is in its subordination to the rational. Shakespeare knew this well, and while he has portrayed every phase of the emotions with all the allurements and attractions which undisciplined ardor knows how to offer, he has not failed to show the evil results which are sure to follow when reason fails to obtain control. The Juliets, the Ophelias and the Desdemonas perish, the victims of their own impulses, but women like Portia, whose wealth of feeling was not under the sway of caprice, loved, not only to their o\Vn advantage, but to that of their households. No submission is more womanly than that of Portia to her husband, but it is the submission of strength and not of weakness.

Of the many old superstitions in regard to woman there is one which has not entirely passed away, and that is that women by a kind of intuition or divination have a feeling for truth, which is an easy substitute for the unremitting labor and continual mental activity that is essential to the logical comprehension of truth. Hence the inexactness of women and their inability to tell the truth, not from lack of moral sincerity, but because they do not recognize the fact that a clear apprehension of the truth is not a free natural gift, but is an acquired ability, that is gained only by the most rigorous mental discipline. It would be quite as easy to gain strong physical power without continuous exercise of the muscles as to gain intellectual and moral strength without the constant activity of the moral and intellectual faculties, and women can never expect to arrive at an accurate knowledge of any subject so long as they are willing at a moment’s notice to give hasty answers to the most profound problems, social, economical, religious or philosophical, merely to follow some impulse that with them takes the place of intelligent conviction. So long as this is the case, so long as feeling takes the place of accurate thinking, women can not have that subtlety of analysis and sustained power of reasoning which is absolutely essential to the correct investigation of any subject, philosophical or scientific.

And so of those other mists of feeling which obscure the problems with which women of today have to deal, especially the disposition to let personal matters decide rather than the consideration of broad universal principles. It is not strange that this is the case, since women have been governed so long by motives of personal con­siderations. Yet if they will share in the larger life of today it will be by a recognition of the value of underlying principles, and not through the oldtime artifice, intrigue and use or abuse of personal influence. Is it not a little singular that while patience, one of the most significant virtues in the Middle Ages, and one considered essentially feminine, that in the modern time women are restlessly impatient? Here I should make a distinction and say that they are patient under inevitable physical ills, but are