t is not Mrs. Stowe, or Mrs. Howe, or Miss
Stevenson, or Miss Dix, alone, who is to save the country, but the
thousands upon thousands who are at this moment darning stockings,
tending babies, sweeping floors. It is to them I speak. It is they
whom I wish to get hold of; for in their hands lies slumbering the
future of this nation.

Shall I say that the women of today have not come up to the level of
today,--that they do not stand abreast with its issues,--they do not
rise to the height of its great argument? I do not forget what you have
done. I have beheld, O Dorcases, with admiration and gratitude, the
coats and garments, the lint and bandages, which you have made. If you
could have finished the war with your needle, it would have been
finished long ago; but stitching does not crush rebellion, does not
annihilate treason, or hew traitors in pieces before the Lord.
Excellent as far as it goes, it stops fearfully of the goal. This
ought ye to do, but there other things which you ought not to leave me.
The war cannot be finished by sheets and pillow-cases. Sometimes I am
tempted to believe that it cannot be finished till we have flung them
all away. When I read of the rebels fighting bare-headed, bare-footed,
haggard, and shorn, in rags and filth,--fighting bravely, heroically,
successfully,--I am ready to make a burnt-offering of our stacks of
clothing. I feel and fear that we must come down, as they have to a
recklessness of all incidentals, down to the rough and rugged
fastnesses of life, down to very gates of death itself, before we shall
be ready and worthy to win victories. Yet it is not for the hardest
fights the earth has ever known have been made by the delicate-handed
and purple-robed. So, in the ultimate analysis, it is neither
gold-lace nor rags that overpower obstacles, but the fiery soul that
consumes both in the intensity of its furnace-heat, bending
impossibilities to the ends of its passionate purpose.

This soul of fire is what I wish to see kindled in our women, burning
white and strong and steady, through all weakness, timidity,
vacillation, treachery in church or state or press or parlor,
scorching, blasting, annihilating whatsoever loveth and maketh a
lie,--extinguished by no tempest of defeat, no drizzle of delay, but
glowing on its steadfast path till it shall have cleared through the
abomination of our desolation a highway for the Prince of Peace.

O my countrywomen, I long to see yo