as in each some master-spirit,
whose consecrated purpose was the staple in the wall, from which the
chain of service hung and on whose strength and firmness it steadily
drew. I never visited a single town however obscure, that I did not hear
some woman's name which stood in that community for "Army Service;" a
name round which the rest of the women gladly rallied; the name of some
woman whose heart was felt to beat louder and more firmly than any of
the rest for the boys in blue.

Of the practical talent, the personal worth, the aptitude for public
service, the love of self-sacrificing duty thus developed and nursed
into power, and brought to the knowledge of its possessors and their
communities, it is difficult to speak too warmly. Thousands of women
learned in this work to despise frivolity, gossip, fashion and idleness;
learned to think soberly and without prejudice of the capacities of
their own sex; and thus, did more to advance the rights of woman by
proving her gifts and her fitness for public duties, than a whole
library of arguments and protests.

The prodigious exertions put forth by the women who founded and
conducted the great Fairs for the soldiers in a dozen principal cities,
and in many large towns, were only surpassed by the planning skill and
administrative ability which accompanied their progress, and the
marvellous success in which they terminated. Months of anxious
preparation, where hundreds of committees vied with each other in
long-headed schemes for securing the co-operation of the several trades
or industries allotted to each, and during which laborious days and
anxious nights were unintermittingly given to the wearing work, were
followed by weeks of personal service in the fairs themselves, where the
strongest women found their vigor inadequate to the task, and hundreds
laid the foundations of long illness and some of sudden death. These
sacrifices and far-seeing provisions were justly repaid by almost
fabulous returns of money, which to the extent of nearly three millions
of dollars, flowed into the treasury of the United States Sanitary
Commission. The chief women who inaugurated the several great Fairs at
New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St.
Louis, and administered these vast movements, were not behind the ablest
men in the land in their grasp and comprehension of the business in
hand, and often in comparison with the men associated with them,
exhibited a fine