ainly of the past twenty years--can now be counted by the
hundreds, and their membership by many thousands, and the history of
them all is practically the same.

It is this woman, born of women's clubs, who is the woman of to-day.
She is the centre of the intellectual activity of townships and
neighborhoods all over the country. She forms stock companies, and
builds athenaeums; she is at the head of working guilds; she organizes
classes, teaches what she knows, while she is being taught what she
did not know; and in mental activity, and labor which is not routine,
has renewed her youth, and added to her attractions. She is at the
same time far removed from a lobbyist. She is able to look at
different sides; she is socially at home with the best people in every
sense of the word. She is a lady as well as a woman, and does not
adopt what is _outre_ in order to obtain notoriety.

The New Life[1]

It is a very dull mind, whether belonging to man or woman, that does
not feel stirred by recent movements--not here alone but all over the
world--into some quickening sense of the deeper life, the broader
human claims, the unifying and uniting influences which have sprung
into activity, and which address, not the visionary, but the
thoughtful and far-seeing, with prophetic gleams of a new heaven and a
new earth.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

It is also a very narrow and self-absorbed mind which, only sees in
these openings opportunities for its own pleasure, or chances for its
own advancement on its own narrow and exclusive lines. The lesson of
the hour is help for those that need it, in the shape in which they
need it, and kinship with all and everything that exists on the face
of God's green earth. If we miss this, we miss the spirit, the
illuminating light of the whole movement, and lose it in the mire of
our own selfishness. To women this uplifting, these open doors, mean
more than to men. They have been hedged about with so many
restrictions, forced and held in such blind and narrow ways, that it
is little wonder if sight and steps are feeble, and that they find it
impossible to take it all in, or to recognize at once the full meaning
of the day that is dawning for them.

For we are only at the threshold of a future that thrills us with its
wonderful possibilities;--possibilities of friendship where separation
was; of love where hatred was; of unity where division was; of peace
where war was; of light--physical