before I left Adelaide. The bank failures had affected me
rather badly, and financially my outlook was anything but rosy in the
year 1895. There was, however, plenty of public work open to me, and,
in addition to the many lectures I gave in various parts of the State
on effective voting, I became a member of the Hospital Commission,
appointed that year by the Kingston Government to enquire into the
trouble at the Adelaide Hospital. That same year saw a decided step
taken in connection with effective voting, and in July a league was
formed, which has been in existence ever since. I was appointed the
first President, my brother John became secretary pro tem, and Mr. A.
W. Piper the first treasurer. I felt at last that the reform was taking
definite shape, and looked hopefully to its future. The following year
was especially interesting to the women of South Australia, and,
indeed, to suffragists all over the world, for at the general election
of 1896 women, for the first time in Australia, had the right to vote.
New Zealand had preceded us with this reform, but the first election in
this State found many women voters fairly well equipped to accept their
responsibilities as citizens of the State. But in the full realization
by the majority of women of their whole duties of citizenship I have
been distinctly disappointed. Not that they have been on the whole less
patriotic and less zealous than men voters; but, like their brothers,
they have allowed their interest in public affairs to stop short at the
act of voting, as if the right to vote were the beginning and the end
of political life. There has been too great a tendency on the part of
women to allow reform work--particularly women's branches of it--to be
done by a few disinterested and public-spirited women. Not only is the
home the centre of woman's sphere, as it should be, but in too many
cases it is permitted to be its limitation. The larger social life has
been ignored, and women have consequently failed to have the effect on
public life of which their political privilege is capable.

At the close of a second lecturing tour through the State, during which
I visited and spoke at most of the village settlements, I received an
invitation from the Women's Land Reform League to attend a social
gathering at the residence of Miss Sutherland, Clark street, Norwood.
The occasion was my seventy-first birthday, and my friends had chosen
that day (October 31, 1896) to mark thei