ity gives an organized form to all efforts for
its improvement. The nature of problems of this sort requires wide
organization in order to bring into touch with the social need, for
its satisfying, as many persons as possible of means and talent. If
the philanthropist is rich, she employs her money as the expression
of her interest in and recognition of her duty toward society. If not
wealthy, but possessed of time and talent, the woman herself becomes
the instrument of social amelioration, and the money from the coffers
of others is placed in her hands for judicious expenditure. The great
interest in philanthropy which in modern times is evinced by all
classes of society tends to unite the women of to-day in a bond of
common sympathy and purpose. It is not solely because they have more
abundant leisure than men that the burden of philanthropy rests upon
their shoulders, for their wider sympathy and clearer insight lead
them to perceive more readily and to meet more effectively the needs
of mankind.

One of the prominent women of England who gave herself largely to
benevolent labors was the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. The generous and
wise use of her immense fortune has secured her an enduring name; she
built churches, she founded charities; and although London was the
chief field for her philanthropy, her native country of Ireland was
remembered in a way to shrine her name there in grateful memory. She
possessed the spirit of the great ladies of old England, who felt
a responsibility toward the dependent and necessitous classes about
them, and to this spirit she gave the wide expression her fortune and
her exceptional environment made possible. The great variety of her
benevolent sympathies and the personal part she took in the various
charities which enlisted them cause her life to mark an era in the
history of philanthropy. There was nothing beyond the catholicity of
her spirit.

The modern temperance movement, which enlisted largely the interest
of the women of England and America, and which led, in the latter
country, to the organization of the Women's Christian Temperance
Union, found its best representative in England in the person of Lady
Henry Somerset. Lady Somerset's efforts in behalf of temperance
and social reforms in England are too much matters of present-day
knowledge to need more than a notice of them in these pages; they have
enrolled her name in the list of great women of the century, where it
had alr