that which belongs to them. They are not children, nor idiots,
and they ought to have the same right of action as is accorded to
sane men.

The address of Mrs. JULIA WARD HOWE was as follows: This mighty
edifice of the ideal society has many mansions, whose doors open
one after the other in the ruins of the ages. When Providence has
removed the mysterious seal from one of these doors those who
know the signs of the times gladly enter. And soon the halt and
the lame and the blind hear of the new refuge, the new
benefaction, and make haste to crowd its halls and parlors.
America itself was at first such a refuge. The derided Puritans
rode there nobly across the highway of the ocean. By and by it
leaked out that civil and religious liberty had made a good thing
of it, and then the Old World began to sneak over into the
spacious domain of the New. And now it comes with such a tide
that we can scarcely build cities and railroads fast enough for
its accommodation. America is to the nations a house of God--a
divinely appointed city of refuge. Poorly have we administered
that house of God, because we ourselves were undivine. But we
have improved a little--we have learned some lessons--we have
opened some doors. And every lesson that we have learned has
shown us more and more of the grand but terrible labor which lies
before us. What one should be, and know, and intend, in order to
come up to the standard of an American, that is something which
as yet puts most of us to the blush, not for being so much, but
so little children of the New World; for this may the Old World
deride us.

[Illustration: Julia Ward Howe.]

I can not see this New World as it ought to be, in my remotest
vision, without many changes in what it is. Looking towards this
great aim of building a Christian state, I see the position of
woman as wrong and harmful. Wrong to herself since she is pushed
one remove further from the divine than man--she, born of the
same humanity and divinity with himself. Wrong to society since
she, with special gifts and powers for its aid and advancement,
is forcibly restrained to the functions which man deigns to allow
her; her attitude to law, labor and life being determined by him
through the old principle of barbarism, the predominance of