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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
bushes, and I can not describe their alabaster beauty when each one hfis on it a thousand stainless blooms.
On a cotton plantation in the Red River country, in Grant Parish, lives an eight- een-year-old girl who is her father’s engineer. She runs the cotton gin and gins every year about eighteen hundred bales. She handles that snorting machine as if it were a baby, oils it, feeds it, feels over it, scolds it, tidies it up, and when it is working as good as gold she sits beside it—dear, dainty and only eighteen—crocheting lace for her petticoats. Dead forever, in the face of these shining facts, is the old reproach, “ as helpless as a woman!” In every parish are women farmers, stock raisers and planters, and a typical Louisiana woman planter, honorably representing the gracious womanhood of her state on your Board of Lady Managers, is our Miss Katherine L. Minor. All professions are open to woman. She is legally eligible for any office. I wear today on my breast a medal given me by the working women of New Orleans; the givers represented twenty different trades and professions; and that is not bad for the South, whose women Lincoln emancipated when he did the slaves.
Women are a power in the South of fearful force when they organize. It was the women of Louisiana who killed the Louisiana State Lottery. When the Women’s Anti-Lottery League was formed, the lottery leaders practically admitted they had got their Waterloo.
I have said that life is easy. Perhaps it is too easy to be quite good for us. One day I called a colored man out of the street to help us move some furniture. He was, as he expressed it, “ settin’ on the wheel of time,” and “letting it roll over with him.” I offered him a quarter for the job. He rummaged in his pockets and finally bawled back at me: “ I reckon I ain’t gwine to missy; I’se got fifteen cents.”
Our climate is genial. We do not need heavy clothes or big fires. In the country, and in nearly all the small villages and towns, fuel costs only for the hauling. Diphtheria, typhoid fever and small-pox are never dangerously prevalent. Yellow fever has been quarantined out of the state successfully for fifteen years. It will never devastate us aagain. House rents are cheap, schools are good, and it is indeed God’s country for little children.
And this brings me to say a word on the relations between the blacks and the white people. What a child-like, lovable, improvident, aggravating, dependent creature the negro is on his native heath only those who are born and brought up amongst them know. It is to the older ones we must turn for all those beautiful and humorous traits that grace the exquisite and tender stories of Thomas Nelson Page, Richard Malcolm Johnson and Joel Chandler Harris. What a pride of family have these fine old mammies and sable men-servants who toted their masters and mistresses when all were children together. In my own family is an eccentric old fellow who owns us all and rules us with a rod of iron. His name is “ Mr. Montague.” Often on those red letter Sundays when we are to have ice cream for dinner, he will go to the street corner and- call back to know if it is time to come and freeze the cream. I mildly scolded him for this. “Well,” said he, “when we is going to have ice cream we might as well let the neighbors know about it.”
One proud old mammy, who is now out at pasture, or “ exempt,” in the home she served so faithfully, told me with delight that when the soldiers came to search her madame’s house during the war, she hung all the family silver under her dress and, sitting by the fire, pretended she was too old and too 'fat to stir. 1 might tell stories galore of the picturesque, pathetic and sweet side of the negro character as we know it best.
Is a woman safe in the South?
A thousand times, yes. She gets always what she asks for, and every man is her guard of honor. To the working woman every man’s hat is off, and in social life she holds securely the position that her virtues, her brains and her blood demand. I can say no better word for the chivalry of the men of my state than to remind you that alone, with a twelve-year-old lad, I traveled in a private vehicle eighteen hundred