profoundest grief at her
defeats; complete, I implore you, the sacrifice already begun, and give
to your regenerated country, in the very dawn of the new day which is to
see her start afresh upon the shining track of national glory,
yourselves, your best energies, and affections. Love liberty--love
justice--love simplicity--love truth and consistency. See to it that the
cause of republican freedom suffer not its greatest drawback from your
failure to lead society up to the point to which you have the power to
educate it. By your office as the natural leaders and educators of
society; by your mission as the friends and helpers of all who suffer;
by your high privilege as the ordained helpmate of man in the work,
under God and His truth, of evangelizing the world, and lifting it out
of its sin and sorrow; by your obligations to the glorious principles of
Christian republicanism; and by your hopes of complete ultimate
enfranchisement, I adjure you. The world has need of you, the erring,
sin-struck world. Your country, even now struggling in the throes of its
later birth, has desperate need of you. Man has need of you; already are
being woven between the long-estranged sexes new and indissoluble bonds
of union,--sympathies, beautiful, infinite, deathless; and, with a
pleased and tender smile of recognition across the continent, he hails
you _helper_! Your era dawns in sad and sombre seeming, indeed, in a
land deluged with fraternal blood; but yours are all who need, all who
sin, all who suffer. Shall the progress of humanity wait upon your
supineness, or neglect, or refusal? Or shall the era now beginning,
through you speedily culminate into the bright, perfect day of your
country's redemption, and thus lead progress and salvation throughout
the nations of the earth? Never were women so near the attainment of
woman's possibilities as we American women; never so near the
realization of that beautiful ideal which has ever shaped the dreams and
colored the visions of mankind, making Woman the brightest star of man's
love and worship.

Will she realize the dream--will she justify the worship? That is the
question that concerns her now.

A WREN'S SONG.

It is not often in these dark days that I can sleep as I used to do
before the flood came and swept away all that my soul held dear; but
last night, I was so weary in body with a long journey, that I fell
asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, and slept on until