and maternal hopes; it is ignorance,
poverty, misery, for themselves and children. My own attention
was first called to this reform by the sufferings of women. (Mr.
May here related several touching anecdotes of most estimable
women he had known, devoted wives, mothers, sisters, daughters,
who had been utterly despoiled of all earthly comfort by the
intemperance of those they loved).

At one time I thought this evil might be repressed by man alone;
but I have learned that humanity is dual. God made man male and
female. The sexes are equally concerned in the welfare of the
race. What God has joined together must not be put asunder. Women
are constituent parts of the State and the Church, as well as of
the home; and their influence is as indispensable to the
well-being of the former as the latter. A State or Church that
excludes woman from its councils, is like a family without a
mother, in a condition of half orphanage.

In the days of our Revolution women made as many sacrifices and
endured as great sufferings for independence, as did the men. It
is most ungrateful when we are speaking of that event, and the
actors in it, not to make mention of our Revolutionary Mothers.
In the French Revolution women were conspicuous actors. If Madame
Roland and her coadjutors had been allowed to sway the public
councils, the results would have been far happier for France.

In moral revolutions women have ever signalized themselves. It
was a woman, Elizabeth Fry, who in England commenced the reform
in the discipline of prisons, and prosecuted it in person for
years, until she had proven her plans feasible, and inspired
others with a faith like her own. It was Dorothea Dix (a very
delicately organized woman), who first in this country recognized
the claims and acknowledged the rights of the insane. She found
these poor victims of man's ignorance everywhere suffering
terrible hardships. They were dreaded by all, and abhorred by
many who had charge of them, and believed to be incapable of
suffering as sane people suffer, and to be beyond the reach of
those kindly influences which more than all others control those
who are in their right minds. Miss Dix penetrated their
cheerless, dark, damp abodes. She brought to light the wrongs
that were inflicted upo