As the first cry of Sergius rang through the halls, the armor bearer appeared at the door; and before many more seconds had elapsed, other slaves, armed and unarmed, swarmed forth from different courts and passages, until the antechamber was filled with them. None of them knew what had happened, but they saw that, in some way, Cleotos had incurred the anger of his master, and lay stunned and bleeding before them. To obey was the work of a moment. The giant Drumo, stooping down, wound his arm around the body of Cleotos, hoisted him upon his broad shoulder, and stalked out of the room. The other slaves followed. AEnone, who, in the delirium of her defiance, might have tried to resist, was overpowered by her own attendants, who also had flocked in at Sergius's call, and now gently forced her from the room. And in a moment more, Sergius was left alone with Leta.

She, crouching in a dark corner of the room, awaited her opportunity to say the words which she dared not say while he was in this storm of wild passion; he, thinking himself entirely alone, stalked up and down like a caged tiger, muttering curses upon himself, upon AEnone, upon the slave, upon all who directly or indirectly had been concerned in his supposed disgrace. Let it not be forgotten that, though at first he had acted hastily and upon slight foundation of proof, and had cruelly wounded her spirit by abhorrent insinuations, without giving time or opportunity for her to explain herself, she had afterward given way to an insane impulse, and had so conducted herself as to fix the suspicion of guilt upon herself almost ineffaceably. What further proof could he need? While, with false lips, she had denied all, had she not, at the same time, lavished tender caresses upon the vile slave?

Then, too, what had he not himself done to add to the sting of his disgrace? Convinced of her guilt, he should have quietly put her away, and the truth would have leaked out only little by little, so as to be stripped of half of its mortification. But he had called up his slaves. They had entered upon the scene, and would guess at everything, if they did not know it already! The mouths of menials could not be stopped. To-morrow all Rome would know that the imperator Sergius, whose wife had been the wonder of the whole city for her virtue and constancy, had been deceived by her, and for a low-born slave! Herein, for the moment, seemed to lie half the disgrace. Had it been a man of rank and celebrity like himself—but a slave! And how would he dare to look the world in the face—he who had been proud of his wife's unsullied reputation, even when he had most neglected her, and who had so often boasted over his happy lot to those who, having the reputation of being less fortunate, had complacently submitted themselves to bear with indifference a disgrace which, at that age, seemed to be almost the universal doom!

Frantically revolving these matters, he raged up and down the apartment for some moments, while Leta watched him from her obscure corner. When would it be time for her to advance and try her art of soothing? Not yet; for while that paroxysm of rage lasted, he would be as likely to strike her as to listen. Once he approached within a few feet of her, and, as she believed herself observed, she trembled and crouched behind a vase. He had not seen her, but his eye fell upon the vase, and with one blow he rolled it off its pedestal, and let it fall shattered upon, the marble floor. Was it simply because the costly toy stood in his way? Or was it that he remembered it had been a favorite of AEnone? One fragment of the vase, leaping up, struck Leta upon the foot and wounded her, but she dared not cry out. She rather crouched closer behind the empty pedestal, and drew a long breath of relief as, after a moment, he turned away.

At last the violence of his passion seemed to have expended itself, and he sank upon the lounge, and, burying his face in his hands, abandoned himself to more composed reflection. Now was the time for her to approach. And yet she would not address herself directly to him, but would rather let him, in some accidental manner, detect her presence. Upon a small table stood a bronze lamp with a little pitcher of olive oil beside it. The wicks were already in the sockets, and she had only to pour in the oil. This she did noiselessly, as one who has no thought of anything beyond the discharge of an accustomed duty. Then she lighted the wicks and stealthily looked up to see whether he had yet observed her.

The lamp somewhat brightened the obscurity of the room, sending even a faint glimmer into the farther corners, but he took no notice of it. Perhaps he may have moved his head a little toward the light, but that was all. Otherwise there was no apparent change or interruption in his deep, troubled thought. Then Leta moved the table with the lamp upon it a few paces toward him, so that the soft light could fall more directly upon his face. Still no change. Then she softly approached and bent over him.

What could he be thinking of? Could he be feeling aught but regret that he had thrown away years of his life upon one who had betrayed him so grossly at the end? Was he not telling himself how, upon the morrow, he would put her away, with all ceremony, forever? And might he not be reflecting that, AEnone once gone, there would be a vacant place to be filled at his table? Would he not wish that it should be occupied without delay, if only to show the world how little his misfortune had affected him? And who more worthy to fill it than the one whose fascinations over him had made it empty? Was not this, then, the time for her to attract his notice, before other thoughts and interests could come between her and him?

Softly she touched him upon the arm; and, like an unchained lion, he sprang up and stared her in the face. There was a terrible look upon his features, making her recoil in dismay. Was that the affectionate gaze with which she had expected to be greeted? Was that the outward indication of the pleasing resolves with which her eager fancy had invested his mind?

Never had she been more mistaken than in her conceptions of his thoughts. In them there was for herself not one kindly impulse; but for the wife whom he had deemed so erring, there was much that was akin to regret, if not to returning affection. The violence of his passion had been so exhausting, that something like a reaction had come. A new contradiction seemed developing itself in his nature. This man, who a few minutes before had prejudged her guilty, because he had seen the lips of a grateful slave pressed against her hand, now, after having seen her so aroused and indifferent to reputation as to defend that slave in her arms, and claim him for at least a friend and brother, began to wonder whether she might not really be innocent. She had confessed to nothing—she had asserted her blamelessness—she had never been known to waver from the truth; might she not have been able to explain her actions? With his regret for having, in such hasty passion, so compromised her before the world that no explanation could henceforth shield her from invidious slander, he now began to feel sorrow for having so roughly used her. Whether she was false or not—whether or not he now loved her—was it any the less true that she had once been constant and loved by him, and did the memories of that time, not so very long ago, bring no answering emotion to his heart? Who, after all, had ever so worshipped him? And must he now really lose her? Might it not be that he had been made the victim of some conspiracy, aided by fortuitous elements?

It was just at this point, when, in his thoughts, he was stumbling near the truth, that the touch of Leta's hand aroused him; and in that instant her possible agency in the matter flashed upon him like a new revelation. She saw the tiger-like look which he fastened upon her, and she recoiled, perceiving at once that she had chosen an inopportune moment to speak to him. But it was now too late to recede.

'Well?' he demanded.

'I have lighted the lamp,' she faltered forth. 'I knew not that I should disturb you. Have you further commands for me?'

Still his fierce gaze fixed upon her; but now with a little more of the composure of searching inquiry.

'It is you who have brought all this destruction and misery upon me,' he said at length. 'From one step unto another, even to this end, I recognize your work. I was a weak fool not to have seen it before.'

'Is it about my mistress that you speak?' she responded. 'Is it my fault that she has been untrue?'

'If she is false, what need to have told me of it? Was it that the knowledge of it would make me more happy? And did I give it into the hands of my own slaves to watch over my honor? Is it a part of your duty that for weeks you should have played the spy upon herself and me, so as to bring her secret faults to light?'

She stood silent before him, not less amazed at his lingering fondness for his wife than at his reproaches against herself.

'How know I that she is guilty at all?' he said, continuing the train of thought into which his doubts and his better nature had led him. 'I must feel all this for certain. How do I know but what you have brought it about by some cunning intrigue for your own purposes? Speak!'

For Leta to stop now was destruction. Though to go on might bring no profit to her, yet her safety depended upon closing forever the path of reconciliation toward which his mind seemed to stray. And step by step, shrouding as far as possible her own agency, she spread out before him that basis of fact upon which she so well knew how to erect a false superstructure. She told him how the intimacy of AEnone and Cleotos had led her to keep watch—how AEnone had once confessed having had a lover in the days of her obscurity and poverty—how that this Greek was that same lover—and how improbable it was that he could have been domiciled in that house by chance, or for any other purpose than that of being in a situation to renew former intimacies. She told how, after long suspicion, she had settled this identity of the former lover with the slave—and how she had seen them, in the twilight of that very day, standing near the window and addressing each other endearingly by their own familiar names. As Sergius listened, the evident truthfulness of the facts gradually impressed themselves upon him; and no longer doubting his disgrace, he closed his heart against all further hope and charity and affection. The pleasant past no longer whispered its memories to his heart—those were now stifled and dead.

'And what reward for all this do you demand?' he hissed forth, seizing Leta by the arm, 'For of course you have not thus dogged her steps day after day, without expectation of recompense from me.'

Did he mean this—that she was capable of asking reward? Or was he cunningly trying her nature, to see whether she might prove worthy of the great recompense which she had promised herself? It was almost too much now to expect; but her heart beat fast as she saw or fancied she saw some strange significance in the gaze which he fastened upon her. Babbling incoherently, she told how she did not wish reward—how she had done it all for love of him—how she would be content to serve him for life, with no other recompense than his smile—and the like. Still that gaze was fastened upon her with penetrating power, more and more confusing her, and again she babbled forth the same old expressions of disinterested attachment. How it was that at last he understood her secret thoughts and aspirations, she knew not. Certainly she had not spoken, or even seemed to hint about them. But whether she betrayed herself by some glance of the eye or tremor of the voice, or whether some instinct had enabled him to read her, of a sudden he burst into a wild, hollow laugh of disdain, threw her from him, and cried, with unutterable contempt:

'This, then, was the purpose of all! This is what you dreamed of! That you, a slave—an hour's plaything—could so mistake a word or two of transient love-making as to fancy that you could ever be anything beyond what you are now! Poor fool that thou art!—Oho, Drumo!'

The giant entered the room, and Leta again drew back into the closest obscurity she could find, not knowing what punishment her audacity was about to draw upon her. But worse, perhaps, than any other punishment, was the discovery that Sergius had already forgotten her; or rather, that he thought so little about her as to be able to dismiss her and her pretensions with a single contemptuous rebuke. He had called his armor bearer for another purpose than to speak of her. A new phase had passed over his burdened and excited mind. He could not endure that solitude, with ever-present disagreeable reflection. And since his disgrace must, sooner or later, be known, he would brave it out by being himself the first to publish it.

'Is it not to-morrow that the games begin?'

'Yes, master,' responded the armor bearer.

'And does it not—it seems to me that I promised to my friends a banquet upon the previous night. If I did not, I meant to have done so. Go, therefore, and bid them at once come hither! Tell the poet Emilius—and Bassus—and the rest. You know all whom I would have. Let them know that I hold revel here, and that not one must dare to stay away! Tell my cooks to prepare a feast for the gods! Go! Despatch!'

The giant grinned his knowledge of all that his master's tastes would require, and left the room to prepare for his errand. And in a moment more Sergius also departed, without another thought of the Greek girl, who stood shrinking from his notice in the shadow of the farthest corner.



APHORISMS.—NO. XII.

Knowledge and Action.—It is a common fault of our humanity, when not sunk too low in the scale of intellect, to seek knowledge rather than attempt any laborious application of it. We love to add to our stock of ideas, facts, or even notions of things, provided moderate pains will suffice; but to put our knowledge in practice is too often esteemed servile, or eschewed as mere drudgery. Useful activities flatter pride, and gratify the imagination, too little. But of what avail, ordinarily, is the possession of truth, unless as light to direct us in the ways of beneficent labor, for ourselves and for our fellow men? There are, indeed, objects of knowledge which elevate the soul in the mere act of contemplation; but, in most cases, if what we learn is brought into no definite relation to the practice of life, the acquisition is barren, and the labor of making it apparently a loss of time and strength.

This is no censure upon the course of learning as a process of mental discipline; for this in itself is one of the most productive forms of human activity.



EXCUSE.

Song, they say, should be a king, Crowned and throned by lightning-legions Only they may dare to sing Who can hear their voices ring Through the echoing thunder-regions.

Yet, below the mountain's crest, Chime the valley-bells to heaven; If we may not grasp the best, Deeper, closer, be our quest For the good that Fate has given.

Parching in its fever pain, Many a tortured life is thirsting For a cooling draught to drain, Though it flash no purple vein From the mellow grape-heart bursting.

Must our sun-struck gaze despise Starry isles in light embosomed? Must we close our scornful eyes Where the valley lily lies, Just because the rose has blossomed?

Though the lark, God's perfect strain, Steep his song in sunlit splendor; Though the nightingale's sweet pain With divine despair, enchain Dew-soft darks in silence tender;

Not the less, from Song's excess, Sings the blackbird late and early: Nor the bobolink's trill the less Laughs for very happiness, Gurgling through its gateways pearly.

Though we reach not heavenly heights, Where the sun-crowned souls sit peerless, Let us wing our farthest flights Underneath the lower lights;— Soar and sing, unfettered, fearless—

Sings as bubbling water flows— Sing as smiles the summer sunny. Royal is the perfect rose, Yet, from many a bud that blows, Bees may drain a drop of honey.



AMERICAN WOMEN.

A great deal has been said and written in this age and country on the subject of what is technically called woman's rights; and, in the course of such agitation, many good and true things have been thought out and made available to the bettering of her condition, besides many foolish and impracticable, arising from a too grasping desire for a wider and more exciting sphere of effort, as well as from a palpable misapprehension of their own nature and their legitimate sphere, which prevails quite extensively among women. The pioneers of the rights of woman have done a good work, however, and may well be pardoned wherein they have gone beyond what might be fairly and profitably demanded for our sex. They have called the public attention to the subject, and have enlisted the thoughts and the services of many earnest men as well as women in their cause; thus provoking that inquiry which will eventually lead to the finding of the whole truth concerning woman, her rights, privileges, duties. And for this, in common with the pioneers in every cause that has for its object the amelioration and advantage of any class of human beings, they deserve the thanks of all. That there should be some ultraists, who would not know where to stop in the extravagant and unsuitable claims they urge, was to be expected. This should not blind our eyes to the lawful claims of woman upon society, nor is it sufficient to throw ridicule upon a movement which has, in this day, indeed, borne its full share of obloquy from the careless, the thoughtless, the too conservative, all of whom are alike clogs upon the wheel of human progress.

This is not the age nor ours the people to shun the fair discussion of any question, much less one which commends itself as of practical importance. This American people has proved, by the calm and patient consideration it has accorded to the advocates of woman's rights, that it has reached that lofty point in the progress of society at which woman is regarded as a positive quantity in the problem which society is working out, and it marks an era in the history of the sex, prophetic of the full enjoyment of all the rights which are hers by nature, or may be hers by favor. I think that in this country, at least, woman has been put upon a very clear and unobstructed path, with many encouragements to go on in the highest course of improvement of which she is capable. There seems to be a general disposition to investigate, and to allow her the rights she claims—rights of education, of labor, of property, of a fair competition in any suitable field of enterprise; so that she bids fair to become as self-supporting, independent, and intelligent as she desires. It is true that much is still said of the jealousy and selfishness of men, leading them to monopolize most of the sources of profitable effort to their own use, thus cramping the sphere of woman, and making her dependent and isolated.

Now, it is very much a question with me whether, after all, the failure, so far, to secure these fancied rights, is not quite as much the result of woman's backwardness and inefficiency as of man's jealous and greedy monopoly; whether the greatest obstacle does not lie in the adverse opinions prevailing among women themselves. According to my observation, as fast as women have proved themselves adapted to compete with men in any particular field, their brothers have forthwith striven to make the path easy and pleasant for them.

But there is a natural and necessary jealousy excited when women attempt to go out of the beaten track, and establish new conditions and resources for themselves—a jealousy which has its source in the instinctive feeling of civilized society, that the standard of womanhood must not be lowered; that its safety and progressive well-being depend upon the immaculate preservation of that pure and graceful ideal of womanhood which every true man wishes to see guarded with a vestal precision. And society will pause, thoughtfully to consider, before the stamp of its approbation is affixed to any mode of development by which that lofty ideal would suffer. Anything which tends in the least to unsex, to unsphere woman, by so much works with a reflex influence on man and on society, and produces in both a gradual and dangerous deterioration. And self-preservation is the first instinct of society as well as of the individual being. Man, and the eternal and infinite order of the world, require that woman keep her proper place, and that she demand nothing which, granted, would introduce confusion and disorder among the social forces.

But it is not so much of woman's rights that I would speak. I am not afraid but that she will possess these in due time, as fast as her nature and true place and mission in the world come to be more fully understood. I am far more anxious that she should come into such more perfect understanding.

Woman has always been a puzzle, an enigma, to man. When, in the pride of his anatomical skill, he has essayed to make her his study, thinking to master the secret of her curious physical being, he has been forced to stop short of his purpose, dumb and blind in the presence of that wondrous complexity that no science of his own can master; and no casuist has yet solved the why of her equally wonderful and complex mental and spiritual being. They have made Reason, cold, critical, judge, the test; but the fine, delicate essence of her real being has always eluded it. When Love seeks the solution—the large, generous Love, that is one day to sit as the judge of all things, supreme over purblind human Reason—then she will be understood, for she will yield to the asking of that all-seeing One. This will be when the world is ripe for the advent of woman, who shall rule through love, the highest rule of all. Slowly, slowly, though surely, is the world ascending, through the wondrous secret chain of influences binding her to the moral order of the universe, to the height of this supernal law of love; and there, in that new and holy kingdom, woman's crown and sceptre await her.

But who shall say that a glimmer of this future royal beauty and glory has yet dawned upon her?

If man has misunderstood woman, she has none the less misunderstood herself. Indeed, her feet have for ages been treading debatable ground, that has shaken beneath her through the clashings of man's ignorance and her own vague, restless clamors and aimlessness. She has felt the stirrings within of that real being she was created, but has never dared to assert herself, or, to speak more truly, has only known to assert herself in the wrong direction. False voices there have been without number, but not even yet has true womanhood been able, in spite of its irrepressible longings, to utter that clear, free, elevated speech that shall yet stir the keenest pulses of the world.

As it is, the world has nearly outgrown the petty jealousy, the cool assumption of inferiority, the flippant criticism of her weaknesses, the insulting catering to her foibles, with which woman has been accustomed to be treated, and which have made her either the slave, the toy, or the ridicule of man; and it is getting to see that she is at least of as much relative importance as man; that without her he will in vain aspire to rise; that, by a law as infallible as that which moves and regulates the spheres, his condition is determined by hers; that wherever she has been a slave, he has been a tyrant, and that all oppression and injustice practised upon her has been sure in the end to rebound upon himself. If there is one thing more than another which, at any given period and in any particular nation, has pointed to the true state of society along the scale of advancement, it has been the degree of woman's elevation; the undercurrents of history have all set steadily and significantly in the direction of the truth, which the world has been slow to accept and make use of, indeed, that society nears perfection only in the proportion in which woman has been honored and enfranchised; in which she has had opportunity and encouragement to work and act in her own proper and lawful sphere.

Those who have gone the farthest in claiming special rights for woman have generally based their demands upon a virtual abandonment of the idea of sex, except in a physical sense. Here is a primary, fundamental error. There is unquestionably a sex of mind, of soul, and he who ignores or denies this is, it seems to me, studying his subject without the key which alone will unlock it.

Another error which many of the advocates of woman's rights have fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses, disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere is intended to be no way different from man's.

And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of precedence in the scale of being.

A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin, then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought—feeling; reflection—spontaneity; knowledge—emotion; perception—reception; reason or intellect—affection or heart. The intelligent being unites these conditions—he is supreme in but one. Man reasons—woman feels; man analyzes—woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by induction—woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference, in kind, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that of a man of genius and a man of talent. Genius grasps the idea, and works from it outward; talent moulds the form in which the already created idea may be embodied. Genius is creative, comprehensive, intuitive, all-seeing; talent is acute, one-sided, cumulative, inductive. The men of genius will ever be found to be gifted with this womanly quality of mind—the power of seizing truth, ideas, with the heart and soul, through love, rather than with the understanding, through reason.

Woman understands faith, or the taking things on trust; she has no love for that logical process of thought whereby, step by step, man delights to prove a fact in nature or law with mathematical precision and certainty. With the hard details and closely connected steps which make up the body of any science, mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, she has no patience. Her mind is not receptive of formulas or syllogisms. She comprehends results, but is incurious as to causes. She knows what love or benevolence means, under its triple form of charity, mercy, magnanimity, which, like a sea, surrounds the universe; she has no idea of law and justice, which are the eternal pillars thereof. If man feels or loves, it is because his reason is convinced; woman's affections go beyond reason, and without its aid, into the clear realm of ultimate belief. This is why there are so few skeptics in religious things among our sex. Woman's mental and spiritual constitution render belief or faith easy and natural. She is receptive in all the parts of her being.

I conclude, therefore, that in the outer world of fact, of demonstration, of volitions and knowledges, of tangible proofs and causalities, of positive and logical effects of reason, of all outward and material processes, man is supreme; while in that finer, higher, more subtile sphere of intuitions, loves, faiths, spiritual convictions, which overtop our actual life, and lead it up from grossness to glory, woman is the oracle and priestess. In the basic qualities of our nature man is stronger—woman, in those which, in grace, beauty, and sweetness, taper nicely toward its apex.

But are the two spheres therefore at war? By no means. Are they at all independent of each other? Are they not rather conjoined indissolubly? It is a fatal mistake which places an antagonism between the two. There should be between them harmony as sweet as that which moves the concentric rings of Saturn. Untaught by the presence and inspiration of woman, man becomes a cold, dry petrifaction, constantly obeying the centripetal force of his being, and adoring self. Without his basal firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant.

But teach her to reason—man to feel; open up to her the sources of knowledge, and cause him to learn the times of the tides of affection; cultivate her intellect and his heart, and in the healthy action and reaction consequent upon such a balance of forces, you have the true relationship established between the sexes, the relationship which the Creator pronounced perfect in the beginning.

It will be seen that while I attribute to woman a certain superiority both of nature and function, as to the highest part of the nature common to both, I at the same time assert her inferiority in what may be called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his more practical nature, form a sure basis upon which she may rest, do I any the less make her the very crown and perfection of God's human handiwork? Assuredly not. The truth is, if, instead of making comparison where, from the nature of the case, comparison is almost precluded, so great is the difference between them, I were to say that each is the complement or counterpart of the other, and that, alone, each is but a half sphere, and imperfectly rounded at that, I should more nearly approach to accuracy. To make the perfect whole which the Creator had in His idea, the two halves must be united. And so I dignify the oldest of human institutions—marriage. I accord to it the very perfection of wisdom, beauty, utility, adaptation. I am aware that in so speaking I hold to an old-fashioned belief, and tread incontinently, not only on a notion afloat among some of the strong-minded of my sex at the present day, that this institution is nothing more nor less than an engine of selfish and despotic power on the one hand, and of slavish subjection on the other; but on the more moderate idea that it is not desirable for all women, nor even for a majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both sexes—the condition most conducive to the highest, widest, happiest development of the individual man or woman, especially the latter, for it is through marriage only, through the beautiful and sacred wifehood and motherhood which that institution guarantees in purity and holiness, that woman's highest nature finds scope and opportunity. And I make no exceptions. On the contrary, I should say that the exceptions which might occur should invariably be counted as misfortunes. Not that many good, true, noble women do not live and die unmarried. Circumstances, that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it. Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot of woman has been denied her. If not happiness, which comes from content and satisfaction, yet there is something higher, diviner still, arising from duty done and trials endured—blessedness. But such exceptions do not, I conceive, invalidate the general fact that marriage was intended to be the channel for the vast aggregate of human happiness and improvement. I speak of marriage as it should be, as it might be, as it will one day be, when men and women have acquainted themselves with the laws, physical and spiritual, which were intended to adjust these unions between the sexes in a harmonious manner, according to natural sympathies and affinities; laws, infallible, inherent in the individual constitution, and which, if understood and enforced, would obviate much of the sin, misfortune, and misery in the earth. It is a great and curious question, how much of the pain, suffering, and evil so rife among men, is due to the one-sided, blindfold, inconsiderate, and unsuitable marriages every day taking place; filling the homes of the land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the influences derived from character formed and nurtured in such pestilent domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy, misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these disunions, to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to learn with regard to the conditions necessary to a true and legitimate marriage of the sexes. There are thousands of illegal unions that have been blessed by church and magistrate, which yet carry only ban in their train. Whether read literally or not, the old, old story of the temptation and the fall has a significance not often dreamed of in respect to this question of marriage. It was a disturbance of the pure and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions. But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial epoch.

Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood. Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission. And is this not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould—the embryos of character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible. Let her see to it that she honor herself.

Here is the white and plastic tablet of the new-born soul. Let woman fear and tremble to write on that, for the writing shall confront her forever. Like the Roman Pilate, what she has written, she has written. Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent degree—personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of their work as the architects of character. Character! That, after all, is the man, the enduring individual, the real I, to whom the Creator has said, Live forever! Character is simply what education and habit make of a person, starting from the foundation of his inherited organic idiosyncrasies. It is a result—the work of time and countless shapings and impressings. It is not what a man thinks of himself, nor what others think of him, but what he really is in the sight of God, his Maker. This is what shall come out, at last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmosphere into the clear, truthful light of eternity; shall cast off the devices, the flimsy pretences, the temporary shows, the convenient disguises, of this mortal life of mixed substance and shadow, and stand a bare, naked, unclothed fact of being before itself, the universe, and God. Alas! what multitudes of real dwarfs go out every day, 'unhouseled,' into that searching light of eternity.

To be the builder of a fair and comely character; to chisel out a work that shall please the eye of God Himself, in whose estimation Beauty, being His own attribute, is a most holy thing; to see that work of beauty take its place in the well-filled gallery of eternity, and to know that it is your own immortal monument—is this not scope enough, honor enough, praise and glory enough? If women would but rise to the height of their real mission, and faithfully and earnestly assume the rights and fulfil the duties which God has specially devolved upon them, they would so lead man and society up to a higher point that the claims they put forth need not be discussed for an hour; because, then, having proved their adaptability to make good use of every lawful right, society, which in the end always adjusts its forces properly and instinctively, will have tacitly fallen into the necessity or the feasibility of granting them.

Let man erect his scientific formulas, his schools of philosophy, his structures of reason and thought; let him bid the giant forces of nature go in harness for his schemes of improvement or aggrandizement; and by all means let the intellect of woman be cultivated to comprehend intelligently the marvels of man's work; let her, if she will, measure the stellar distances, study the mechanical principles or the learned professions, make a picture or write a book; and there have been women, true and noble women, who have done all these, women who have proved themselves capable of as high attainments, as keen and subtile thought as man; but let her never for such as these abdicate her own nobler work, neglecting the greater for the less. If a woman has a special gift, let her exercise it; if she has a particular mission, let her work it out. Few women, though, are of this elect class. I do not despise, but rather encourage, natural gifts. But I would have women never forget that it is not for what they may possibly add to the sum of human knowledge that the world values them, primarily. That some man is as likely to do as not; but what women fail to do in their own peculiar sphere, no man can possibly do.

When I aver that woman was intended to be a predominant influence in the world through her moral and spiritual being, principally, I must not be understood as depreciating the value to her of mere subjective knowledge. So far from this, I believe that her means of acquiring knowledge of all kinds should be limited only by her capacity. The more her intellect is enlightened and disciplined, the better will she be qualified to exert that refining, elevating influence which is expected of her. There can be no beauty without the element of strength; there can be no love worth the name without knowledge. Were her sense of justice, her logical powers, her reflective faculties carefully trained and exercised, her peculiar womanly graces of soul would shine with tenfold lustre. I mean, simply, that knowledge is specially valuable to her objectively—as a means, and the best means, to the highest end of her being, which is concrete rather than abstract.

Briefly, I say, then, it is in the great departments of ethics, of aesthetics, of religious and spiritual things, that woman is a vital power in human life.

I have thrown out these general preliminary thoughts concerning the nature of woman, and her relations to man and to society, chiefly with reference to a phase of the subject which has not seemed to engage the attention either of women themselves or of those who assume to advocate their cause. It is the important consideration whether, in a free and republican land, woman holds any certain and special relation toward the Government. In other words, have American women any vital share or interest in this grand, free Government of ours? With all the emphasis of a profound conviction, I, answer, Yes. Such a touching and intimate interest as no women ever had before in any Government under the sun. And why?

Because the principles embodied in and represented by it have made her what she is, and they alone can make her what she hopes to be.

If it be true that the position of woman in society is a sure test of its civilization, then is our American society already in the van of progress. Nowhere else in the world is woman so free, so respected, so obeyed, so beloved; nowhere else is the ideal of womanhood so chivalrously worshipped and protected. In the spirit of our political theory, that no class of society is to be regarded as permanently and necessarily disabled from progress and elevation—to which, in our practice, we have hitherto made but one wicked and shameful exception—and under the influence of the powerful tendency of our system to individualism, woman has been allowed a freedom heretofore unparalleled, and onward and upward is still the word.

I do not claim perfection for our system. But I say we have the germs of the healthiest national development. All that remains is to carry forward those germs to maturity, and let them show their legitimate results unhampered. That is what we want, what we claim. Society here is unformed, in the rough. We lack the outward grace and polish belonging only to old societies. We shall yet attain these, as well as some other desirable things; but I believe that in no other country in the world is there so much genuine, delicate, universal devotion manifested for woman as among the Americans. Have you seen a boy of fourteen, shy, awkward, uncouth in manner, rough in speech, but with a great, tender heart thumping in his bosom? And did you know of the idolatrous worship he could not wholly conceal for some fair, sweet, good girl older than himself, a woman, even—a worship, which was not love, if love be other than a high and tender sentiment, but which was capable of filling his being to overflow with its glory and richness? I liken our American chivalry to this. And it is this instinctive natural politeness of our men toward women that, as much as anything else, keeps us from being rude and unrefined while yet in our first adolescence.

I am aware that, hitherto, the South has laid claim to the lion's share of this gallant spirit, as it has of many other polite and social qualities. But we do not so readily now, as a few years ago, yield to these Southern assumptions. We know now for just how much they stand. And we know, too, in the better light of this hour, that it is not possible for a very high and pure ideal of womanhood to be conceived in the atmosphere of a system which, as slavery does, persistently, on principle, and on a large scale, degrades a portion of the sex, no matter how weak, poor, defenceless. Rather, the more defenceless the greater is the wrong, the shame. I am not lauding that gallantry which stands in polite posture in the presence of a lady, hat in hand, and with its selectest bow and smile, and in the same breath turns to commit the direst offences against the peace and purity of womanhood; but that true and hearty, though simple and unostentatious, reverence for the sex, that teaches men to regard all women as worthy of freedom, respect, and protection, simply by virtue of their womanhood. I say not that this chivalry is a Southern, but that it is an American trait. As such I am proud of it.

But does this high and honored place they hold in the hearts of their countrymen devolve no corresponding responsibility upon American women? Is it not a momentous inquiry how far they fall short of the high and commanding standard of thought and action demanded of them in order to meet this heavy obligation? It seems to me that the time is fully ripe for the clearer perception of the fact, that because women are not men, it does not follow that they are not in an important sense citizens. And this, without any reference to the question whether they should be permitted to vote and to legislate; though, as to the former, I do not know of a single valid objection to the exercise of the privilege, while there are several weighing in its favor; and as to the latter, it seems to me that one single consideration would forever, under the present constitution of things, debar her from a share in direct and positive legislation. It is as follows: The central idea of all properly constituted society, without which society would be an incoherent chaos, and governments themselves but the impotent lords of anarchy and misrule, is the home. Of the home, woman, from the very nature of the case, is the inspiriting genius, the ever-present and ever-watchful guardian. And the home, with its purities, its sanctities, its retiracies, its reticences, is far removed from the noise and wranglings of popular assemblies, the loud ambitions and selfish chicaneries of political arenas. The very foundation, pivotal ideas of human nature would be undermined by such publicity. The value of the home, as the nursery of whatever is pure, lovely, holy in the human soul, rests absolutely on the preservation of the modest purity and grace of woman.

How, then, is woman's influence as a citizen in a republican land to be exercised, if she be excluded from positive legislation? I answer, by the moral effect of her personal influence in the formation of mind and character; by her work as the great educator in the home and in society. If hers be not a moral and spiritual influence, it is none at all for good. And of all the powers for good in a republic, this is the strongest, most beneficent, did woman rightly comprehend the issue.

The purity, safety, and perpetuity of a free government rest, ultimately, not so much on forms of law, on precedents, on the ascendency of this or that party or administration, but on the intelligence, morality, and devotion to freedom of the people. What should woman care to legislate, when she may wield such an engine of power as education puts into her hands; when she may mould the minds and inspire the souls of those who are to be the future legislators; when she may, even now, put forth a direct and immediate influence upon those who are the legislators of the present time? For her influence on society is twofold, direct and reflex, present and prospective; it is the most powerful known, the most subtile and secret and determining, viz., personal influence.

To this end, therefore, that she may influence in the right direction, women need to inform themselves, to acquire a knowledge of the principles on which our system rests, and to become thoroughly imbued with their spirit. This will necessitate an acquaintance with the nature and details of our political creed, of which our women, especially, are lamentably ignorant. How many out of every hundred, do you suppose, have even read the Constitution, for instance? You may say that the majority of men have never studied it either, even of the voters. I admit the fact. There is a terrible lack of information among even men on public subjects. But I think this: if women were to educate themselves and their children, all whom they influence, indeed, to make these subjects a matter of personal interest, instead of regarding them as foreign matters, well enough for lawyers and politicians, perhaps, to understand, or for those who expect to fill office, but of no manner of importance to a person in strictly private life, this ignorance would come to an end. This shifting of personal responsibility by the great majority is the bane of our system. The truth is, no one, in a republican government, can lead an absolutely private career. As one who exercises the elective franchise, or one who influences the same, be it man or woman, there is no dodging the responsibility of citizenship. A better State of information on public affairs, also, will induce a correct conception of a certain class of ideas which, more than any others, perhaps, tend to strengthen, deepen, broaden, solidify the mental powers—ideas of absolute law and justice. As I have before said, the female mind is deficient in this particular.

To understand their government and institutions, then, is the first step in the attainment of the standard demanded of American women; or, in other words, an increase of political knowledge—a more thorough political education.

Another step is, the enlargement and strengthening of their patriotism. The former step, too, will conduce to this, and be its natural consequence. I do not mean alone that loose and vagrant sentiment which commonly passes for patriotism, which is aroused at some particular occasion and slumbers the rest of the time; which is spasmodic, temporary, impulsive, and devoid of principle; but that love of country founded on knowledge and conviction; a living faith of the heart based upon duty and principle; and which is, therefore, all-pervading, abiding, intelligent, governing thought and action, and conforming the life to the inner spirit. That sort of patriotism that lives as well in peace time as in war time; that makes the heart throb as sympathetically in behalf of country every day in the year as on the Fourth of July; that leads us to conform our habits of life and thought to the spirit of our institution and policy; that makes us as jealous of the honor, the consistent greatness of our country when all men speak well of her, as when her foes are bent upon her destruction. This habit of mind is what I mean, rather than any transient emotion of heart; an enlightened and habitual spirit of patriotism.

I give American women all credit due them for the patriotic temper they have evinced since this war began. I say that never have women showed more loyalty and zeal for country than the women of the North. Let sanitary fairs and commissions, let soldiers' aid societies from one end of the land to the other, and in every nook and corner of it, let our hospitals everywhere attest this heartfelt love and devotion on the part of our women. It is a noble spectacle, and my heart thrills at the thought of it. We have many noble ones who will stand in history along with England's Florence Nightingale and the 'Mother of the Gracchi,' those eternally fair and tender women, fit for the love and worship of the race. The want is not in the feeling of patriotism, but in the habitual principle and duty of the same. Since the war began, the fire has not slackened. But how was it before the war, and how will it be after it?

To prove what I say, let me dwell a moment on two or three of the most prominent faults of our women, pronounced such by all the world. Of these, the most mischievous and glaring, the most ruinous in thousands of cases, is extravagance. Wastefulness is almost become a trait of our society. American women, especially, are profuse and lavish of money in dress, in equipage, in furniture, in houses, in entertainments, in every particular of life. Everywhere this foolish and wasteful use of money challenges the surprise and sarcasm of the observant foreign tourist through our country. Perhaps the largeness and immensity of our land, its resources and material, as well as the wonderful national advance we have already made, tends to cultivate in our people a feeling of profusion and a habit of extravagant display; but it is not in sympathy either with our creed or our profession.

Were the money thus heedlessly expended made for them by slaves whom they had from infancy been taught to regard as created solely to make money for them to use and enjoy, this extravagant waste of money, while none the less selfish and inexcusable, would appear to grow spontaneously out of the arbitrary rule of slavery; or, if it had descended to them by legal or ancestral inheritance, there might be some show of reason for using it carelessly, though very small sense in so doing. But in a land where labor is the universal law; where, if a man makes money, he must work and sweat for its possession; when fortunes do not arise by magic, but must be built up slowly, painfully, at the expense of the nerve and sinew, the brain and heart of the builders, and these builders, not slaves, but our fathers, husbands, brothers; when a close attention to money-making is rapidly becoming a national badge, and is in danger of eating out entirely what is of infinitely more value than wealth—a high national integrity and conscience—and of sinking the immaterial and intellectual in the material and sensual; in such circumstances as these, I say, and under such temptations and dangers, it is a sin, an unnatural crime, to squander what costs so dear.

Volumes might be written upon the frightful consequences of this extravagance in money matters, this living too fast and beyond their means, of which American women, especially, are guilty. Great financial crises, in which colossal schemes burst like bubbles, and vast estates are swallowed up like pebbles in the sea; commercial bankruptcies, in which honorable names are bandied on the lips of common rumor, and white reputations blackened by public suspicion; minds, that started in life with pure and honest principles, determined to win fortune by the straight path of rectitude, gradually growing distorted, gradually letting go of truth, honor, uprightness, and ending by enthroning gold in the place made vacant by the departed virtues; hearts, that were once responsive to the fair and beautiful in life and in the universe, that throbbed in unison with love, pity, kindness, and were wont to thrill through and through at a noble deed or a fine thought, now pulseless and hard as the nether millstone; souls, that once believed in God, heaven, good, and had faith and hope in immortality, now worshipping commercial success and its exponent, money, and living and dying with their eager but fading eyes fixed earthward, dustward!

Oh, it is a fearful thought that woman's extravagant desires and demands may thus kill all that is best and highest in those who should be her nearest and dearest. Yet, if this wide-spread evil of wastefulness is to be checked, it must be begun in the home, and by its guardian, woman. There is a movement lately inaugurated, looking to retrenchment in the matter of unnecessary expenditure, which, if it is to be regarded other than as a temporary expedient, is worthy of the patriotic enthusiasm which called it forth. I allude to the dress-reform movement made by the loyal women of the great Northern cities. The spirit of this movement I could wish to see illustrated both during the continuance of and after the war. It is this economical habit of mind for the sake of patriotic principle, that I regard as a great step in the attainment of the desired standard for American women.

Another plain fault of our women, and one which in a measure is the cause of the fault above noticed, is the wild chase after and copying of European fashions. We are accused of being a nation of copyists. This is more than half true. And why we should be, I cannot understand. Are we never to have anything original, American? Are we always to be content to be servile imitators of Europe in our art, literature, social life, everything, except mere mechanical invention? I am thankful that we are beginning to have an art, a literature, of our very own. Let us also have a fashion, that shall be, distinctively, if not entirely, American. There is surely enough of us, of our splendid country, our institutions, our theories, our brave, free people, to build for ourselves, from our own foundation, and with our own material. But American Women have yet to inspire society with this patriotic ambition.

Not what is becoming or suitable to her, but what is the fashion, does the American woman buy; not what she can afford to purchase, but what her neighbors have, is too commonly the criterion. This constant pursuit of Fashion, with her incessant changes, this emulation of their neighbors in the manifold ways in which money and time can be alike wasted, and not the necessary and sacred duties of home, the personal attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless except when thus superficially excited.

This duty of self-culture I would notice as one of the demands of the times upon American women in the attainment of the proposed standard. A wide, liberal, generous self-culture, of intellect, of taste, of conscience, for the sake of the better fulfilment of the mission to which, as an American citizen, every woman in the land is called. We do not begin to realize this. It is a great defect in our social system, that, when a woman has left school and settled down in life, she considers it the signal for her to quit all mental acquisition except what she may gather from her desultory reading, and, henceforth, her family and her immediate neighborhood absorb her whole soul under ordinary circumstances. The great majority of our countrywomen thus grow careworn, narrow-minded, self-absorbed. Now this is not right—it is not necessary. A woman's first, most important duty is in her home; but this need not clip the wings of her spirit, so that thought and affection cannot go out into the great world, and feel themselves a part of its restless, throbbing, many-sided life; brain and heart need not stagnate, even if busy, work-a-day life does claim her first endeavors. Indeed, the great danger to our women is not so much that they will become trifling and frivolous, as that they will become narrow-minded and selfish.

But these vices of extravagance and excessive devotion to fashion, of which I have spoken, are due, largely, to a still more radical defect in our social education. I mean its anti-republican spirit. This is our crowning absurdity. We are good democrats—in theory. It is a pity that our practice does not bear out our theory, for the sake of the homely virtue of consistency. To a great many otherwise sensible people our simple republican ways are distasteful, and they are apt to look with, admiring, envious eyes on the conventional life of foreign lords, not considering how burdened with forms it is, and full of the selfishness, the pride and arrogance of the privileged and titled few, at the bitter expense of the suffering, untitled many. The aping of aristocratic pretensions has been a much-ridiculed foible of American women. It is certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades. We have widely departed from the simplicity of the early days and of the founders of the republic, in social life, just as in our political course we had suffered the vital essence of our organic law to become a dead thing, and the whole machinery of the Government to work reversely to its intention. And the cause has been the same in each case. The spirit of a government and the theories embodying it are the reflection of the social condition of a given age and people, so that the one will never be of a higher order than the other; while it is, also, equally true, that the best and most advanced political theories may be suffered to languish in operation, or become wholly dormant, from the influence of social causes. Thus it was that the demoralising effect of human slavery did, up to the time of the great shock which the nation received in the spring of 1861—a shock which galvanized it into life, and sent the before vitiated blood coursing hotly, and, at last, healthfully through all the veins and arteries of the national body—persistently encroach alike upon Government and society. The slime of that serpent was over everything in the North as well as the South, and if it did not kill out the popular virtue and patriotism as completely here as there, where it is intimately interwoven with the life of the people, the difference is due to that very cause, as well as to the inextinguishable vitality that God has conferred on the genius of human liberty, so that when betrayed, hunted, starved, outlawed, she yet seeks some impregnable fastness, and subsists on manna from the Divine Hand. This, then, is the fourth step in the attainment of the true ideal of character for American women—the effort to renew society in the actual simplicity of our republican institutions. Women, American women, should hold dear as anything in life the preservation and purity of those blessed institutions, guaranteeing to them as they do all their eminent privileges, and founded as they are on that emancipating genius of Christianity, which, through every age, has pointed a finger of hope, love, encouragement to woman as a chief instrument in the world's promised elevation and enfranchisement.

While dwelling upon the faults of American women, I would at the same time do full credit to their virtues. I believe that they occupy as high a place as any women in the world, even a higher. But I trust that they will rise to the height of the demands which the changed times and the exigencies of the situation are pressing upon them, and will continue to press. This war has clearly and forcibly eliminated truths and principles which the long rule of the slave power had wellnigh eclipsed; it has been a very spear of Ithuriel, at whose keen touch men and principles start up in their real, not their simulated character. During its three years of progress, the national education has been advanced beyond computation. When it is over, things, ideas, will not go back to the old standpoint. Then will arise the new conditions, demands, possibilities. If there is one truth that has been unmistakably developed by the war, it is the controlling moral power and sanction which a free government derives from woman. And this has been shown not only in the influence for good which the loyal women of the North have contributed for the aid of the Government, but with equal power in the influence for evil which the Southern women have exerted for its destruction. I suppose it is true that this war for slavery has received its strongest, fiercest continuing impulses from the women of the South. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm, the persistency, the heroic endurance, the self-sacrifice they have manifested. Only had it been in a good cause!

Just here let me say a word in behalf of these Southern women. There is a disposition on the part of the Northern public, forming their opinion from the instances of fierce spite and vindictiveness, of furious scorn and hatred, which have been chronicled in the reports of army correspondents and in the sensation items of the newspapers, to regard them as little short of demons in female shape. All this is naturally working a corresponding dislike and ill-feeling among the masses North. To such I would say: These Southern sisters are not demons, but made of the same flesh and blood, and passions and affections as yourselves. The difference between you is purely one of circumstances and training, of locality—above all, of education and institutions. It is as true that institutions are second nature as that habit is.

The peculiar faults of Southern women they share with their Northern sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions, their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance, their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle, thriftless, passionate, or supercilious, than Northern women would be in similar circumstances. It is too much the habit among the unreflecting, in judging of the Southern masses in their hostile attitude toward their lawful Government, to give less weight than it deserves to the necessary and inevitable tendency upon the mind and character of such an institution as African slavery; and to let the blame be of a personal and revengeful nature, which should fall most heavily on the sin itself, the dire crime against God and society, against himself and his fellow man, which the individual is all his life taught is no crime but a positive good. This slavery is woman's peculiar curse, bearing almost equally with its deadly, hideous weight on the white woman of the dominant class as upon the black slave woman. And yet how deluded they are! If that curse does come to an utter end in the South, as it surely will, I shall hail, as one of the grandest results of its extinction, next to the justice due the oppressed people of color, the emancipation of the white women of that fair land, all of them, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, from an influence too withering and deadly for language to depict. Oh, when shall that scapegoat, slavery, with its failures and losses and shortcomings, its frauds and sins and woes, be sent off into the wilderness of non-existence, to be heard from nevermore? God speed the hour!

But with all their faults, they have many and shining virtues. Though the ideal of a Southern woman commonly received at the North and abroad, is not true to the life, being neither so perfect nor so imperfect as their eulogists, on the one hand, and their detractors, on the other, would fain make it to be, there is yet much, very much, to elicit both love and admiration in her character.

The Southern female mind is precocious, brilliant, impressible, ardent, impulsive, fanciful. The quickness of parts of many girls of fifteen is astonishing. I used often to think, what splendid women they would make, with the training and facilities of our Northern home and school education. But, as it was, they went under a cloud at seventeen, marrying early, and either sinking into the inanition of plantation life, or having their minds dissipated in a vain and frivolous round of idle and selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation, and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a something rich, rare, and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to the point of reflection; never learning self-control, nor the necessity of holding passion in abeyance; never getting beyond the degrading influence of intercourse with a race whose stolidity and servility, the inevitable result of their condition, on the one hand, are both the cause and effect of the habit of irresponsible power and selfish disregard of right fostered in the ruling class, on the other—what could be expected of them but to become splendid abortions?

There is another consideration in connection with the excessive war spirit they have evinced, which may help to account for it. I have often had occasion to notice the habit the educated class of Southern women have of conversing familiarly with their male friends and relatives on political subjects, and to contrast it with the almost total reticence of Northern women on subjects of public interest. This, of course, induces a more immediate and personal interest in them, and the more intimate one's interest in a subject, the more easily enthusiasm is aroused toward it.

Now, the very head and front, the bone and marrow of Southern politics for more than three decades, has been—slavery, and plans for its aggrandizement and perpetuation. That has been the ulterior object of all the past vociferations about State rights and Southern rights. Slavery is country, practically, with them, and as it lay at the root of their society, and its check or its extinction would, in their false view, overturn society itself, it was easy for the scheming, cunning leaders of the slave faction to adroitly transfer this enthusiasm, and to raise the watchword, which never yet among any people has been raised in vain, Your homes and firesides! When ever did women hear that cry unmoved?

When country, that grand idea and object of human hope, pride, and affection, had degenerated into a section; and when a false and miserable institution, from its very nature terribly intimate with the life of society, became the most substantial feature of that section; what wonder if the war has at last, whatever it might have been at first, come to the complexion of a contest for home and fireside with the masses of the people, with the majority of the Southern women?

The magnificent dreams and projects, too, of a great slave empire, that should swallow up territory after territory, and astonish the world with its wealth, power, and splendor, which were fused into life in the brains of the great apostles of slavery and secession, had their influence on minds which, like the minds of the Southern women, have a natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern women so much. I pity them infinitely. Just think what they have been educated to believe, and then say if there is not something sadly splendid in the very spirit of endurance, of defiance, of sacrifice, however wrong and mistaken, they have shown. I pity them profoundly, for they are drinking to the lees the cup of suffering, of deprivation, of humiliation, of bitter loss, and stern retribution. And the end is not yet. Deeper chagrin and humiliation must be theirs; more loss, more devastation, more death, and ruin, before their proud hopes and visions are utterly crushed out of life. Oh, are they not being educated, too, as well as we of the North?

When I think of all the grace, loveliness, and generosity of the many Southern women I have known and loved; when I recall the admirable qualities which distinguished them, the grace of manner, the social tact and address, the intellectual sprightliness, the openness and hospitality of soul, the kindliness and sympathy of heart, the Christian gentleness and charity; I can but say to my Northern sisters, These deluded women of the South would, in themselves, be worthy of your esteem and love, could the demon of secession and slavery once be exorcised. And I believe that when it is, and the poor, rent South sits clothed and in her right mind, subdued through sheer exhaustion of strength, and so made fit for the healthy recuperation that is one day to begin, the cause of our beloved country, and of humanity through this country, will have no more generous or loving supporters, ay, none so enthusiastic and devoted as they. I glory in the anticipation of the time when the ardent, impulsive, demonstrative South shall even lead the colder North in the manifestation of a genuine patriotism, worthy of the land and nation that calls it forth. We shall then have gained a country, indeed, instead of being, as heretofore, several sections of a country.

The consistent moulding of society in the spirit of our political ideas is essential to securing us the respect of the world, and to vindicating the principles, themselves, on which having built, they are our sole claim to such honor and respect. As long as we fail so to do, we may be the wonder, and we are likely to be the jest of the onlooking world, but we never can be what we ought to be, its admired and beloved model. It seems to me there is less danger now than formerly of our failure in this important respect. The dangers, the expenses, the burdens, and losses of this fearful civil war will surely create in the hearts of the people everywhere, North and South, a revivified if not a new-born love for, and appreciation of, republican principles, and will teach them where the most insidious danger to them lies; not from open foes, foreign or domestic; not from anything inherent in those free principles; but from a cause exceedingly paradoxical: a democratic people leaving to a party, to a section, the Government which should be their very own; the virtue and intelligence of the nation absenting themselves from the national councils, thus making way for corruption and fraud to enter in an overwhelming flood; one half of the nation rocking its conscience to sleep with the false lullaby of commercial greatness and material prosperity, and the other, left to do the governing, with seemingly no conscience at all, going to work with satanic directness and acuteness, to undermine the principles thus left without a guardian, and to inject the black blood of slavery into the veins of the body politic, till the name democracy became a misnomer the most wretched, a sarcasm the most touching. I do not imagine we shall ever again go back to that. It must be that, in future, the American people will grow into the habit of demanding that an enlightened, patriotic statesmanship shall rule, instead of an unprincipled demagoguism. Also, that they will attend to it that better men are sent to Washington; men chosen because they represent most nearly the great national ideas and interests, which the people will require shall absorb legislation rather than any sectional institution whatever; and not because, primarily, they are the subservient idols of this or that party. It must be that, hereafter, party will be less and the nation more. Of course, parties will exist, necessarily; but if this great American people, having carried on to perfect success this war against a stupendous rebellion, and having gone through the school of knowledge and experience it has been to them, can again settle down into the mere political jobbery into which governmental affairs had deteriorated before the earthquake of war stirred up the dregs of things, it would be an instance of fruitless expenditure of means and life, and of self-stultification, too pitiful for words—such an instance as the world has not yet seen, thanks to the ordained progression of the world.

When peace returns to the land once more; when the fierce fever of blood and strife is quelled; when the vague fears and uncertainties of this period of transition are over, and the keen pangs and bloody sweat of the nation's new birth are all past—what will be the position of this American people? I tremble to contemplate it. It will be much like what I imagine the condition of a freed, redeemed soul to be, just escaped the thraldom, perplexity, and sin of this lower life, and entered on a purer, higher, freer plane of existence. Then comes reconstruction, reorganization, a getting acquainted with the new order of things, and the new duties and experiences to which it will give rise; then will be discoveries of new truths, and new applications of old; old errors and superstitions have been renounced, and facts and principles which have long lain in abeyance, smothered under a weight of neglect and unappreciation, will start into fresh magnitude. And, withal, will come a sense of the reality and security there is in this great change, and of infinite relief and blessedness therein, such as I suppose attends every change from a lower to a higher condition, from darkness to light, from cloud, mystery, and trouble, to the white air of peace and the clear shining of the sun of knowledge.

Then, think of the career that lies ahead of this regenerated nation. This war, fearful and costly as it is, was needed, to rouse men and women to the conviction that there is something more in a people's life than can be counted in dollars and cents; and that their strength consists not alone in commercial superiority or material development, but, principally, in virtue, justice, righteousness. It was needed, to give the lie to that impious and infidel assumption of the South that Cotton is king, and to prove that the God of this heaven-protected land is a true and jealous God, who will not give his glory to Baal. It was needed, to arrest the nation in the fearful mechanical tendency it was assuming, whereby it was near denying the most holy and vital principles of its being; and it was needed, to warm and quicken the almost dead patriotism of the masses, and to educate them anew in the high and pure sentiments they had suffered to be forgotten, and, in forgetting which, many another ration has gone to irretrievable decay and ruin.

I trust in God that this people have not suffered many things in vain, and that the time is dawning when we shall be a nation indeed, a Christian nation, built upon those eternal ideas of truth, justice, right, charity, holiness, which would make us the ideal nation of the earth, dwelling securely under the very smile and benediction of Jehovah.

In this time of which I speak, the people will see that to be a nation we must not be merely servile imitators of Old World ideas, but must develop our own American ideas in every department of government and society; thus, eventually, building up a national structure which shall, which need, yield to none, but may take precedence of all.

We are too young, as yet, to have become such a nation, with its distinctive and separate features, each clearly marked and self-illustrating; but not too young to understand the necessity of working out our own special plan of civilization. As the American nation did not follow the course of all others, by mounting from almost impalpable beginnings up through successive stages to an assured position of national influence and greatness; so need we not imitate them in waiting for gray hairs to see ourselves possessed of a distinct national character. As we did not have to go through the slow, age-long process of originating, of developing ideas, principles, but took them ready made, a legacy from the experience of all the foregoing ages; and as our business is to apply these ideas to the problem we are set to solve, not for ourselves alone, but for the world's peoples, for aggregate humanity, so should we be neither laggard nor lukewarm in fulfilling this high trust, this 'manifest destiny.' In the developing of our special American ideas we have a great work before us—a work but begun, as yet. There is an American art—an American literature—an American society, as well as an American Government, to be shaped out of the abundant material we possess, and compacted into the enduring edifice of national renown. For what is national character, but ideas crystallized in institutions? Until we have done this—given permanency to our special ideas in our institutions—we are a nation in embryo; our manhood exists only in prophecy.

To assist in this mighty work is the duty and privilege of American women. What higher ambition could actuate their endeavors—what nobler meed of glory win their aspirations?

O ye women, dear American sisters, whoever you are, who have offered up your husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, on the red altar of your country, that so that country may be rescued from the foes that seek her honor and life; who have labored and toiled and spent your efforts in supplying the needs of her brave defenders; whose hearts and prayers are all for the success of our holy cause; who are glad with an infinite joy at her successes, and who are sorry with 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 the early morning sun came in through the open window, and woke me with its gentle touch. The air was sweet with spring fragrance, and the first sound that came to my awakened ears was the song of a little wren, a little wren who sang even as to-day in the days of my youth and joy, whose nest is built over the window that was so often a frame for that dearest-loved face. The song brought with it the recollection of all the little songster had outlived—the love, hope, and fear that had sprung up and grown and died, since I had first heard his warbling. And I broke into those quiet tears that are now my only expression of a grief too familiar to be passionate.

To-day is the first of June—a year to-day since all was over!

Three years ago, this very day, was to have been my wedding day. June and its roses were made for lovers, as surely as May, with its May flowers and little lilies, is the month of Mary the Blessed. I had always wished to be married in June, and circumstances combined to render that time more convenient than any other. My love affair had been a long one, and had met with no obstacles. Our families had always been intimate, and I remember him a boy of fourteen, when he first came to live in the house opposite. At sixteen he went to West Point, and when he came home in his furlough year, I was fifteen. We were both in Washington until August; it was a long session; his father was in Congress, and so was mine. Edward Mayne had nothing to do that summer, and I never had much to occupy me; we saw each other every day, and so we fell in love. The heads of both families saw all, smiled a little, and teased a good deal; but no one interfered. My mother said it gave me occupation and amusement, and helped me to pass the long summer evenings, which I thought charming, and every one else thought a bore. It was called a childish flirtation, and when he went back to the Academy, and I to school, the thing dropped out of notice, and was soon forgotten.

But not by us. We remembered each other, and, each in our different lives, we were constant to our early love. And so it came to pass that, when he came back again, after graduating, we were very glad to see each other; the old intercourse was renewed, and the old feeling showed itself stronger for the lapse of years. No one interfered with us; the intimacy between our families had continued, and when we went to the seaside for the hot months, the Maynes went to the same place; and in August Edward had a leave, and came down to join them. I think he would have come if they had not been there, but that makes no difference now. One moonlit night, at the end of August, with the waves at our feet sounding their infinite secret, I promised to marry him; and as we parted that night at the door of our cottage, I looked at the silver-streaked waters, and said to him that neither the broad sea of death nor the stormy sea of life should ever part my soul from his. I have kept my word.

So we were engaged to be married, and were as happy as two young lovers ought to be. Both families were delighted, my father only stipulating that the marriage should not take place immediately. But that we felt no hardship, as Edward was stationed in Washington; and everything in the future looked as bright as everything in the past had ever been. We were sure of a happy winter, and hoped for a gay one, and we had both, though the cloud that had first appeared when the little wren began his summer song, had grown larger and darker day by day, until the signs of storm were no longer to be overlooked, and the fearful prophesied that the day of peace was over. Still I never dreamed of the difference it would make to me.

New Tear's Eve it was decided that we should be married on the first of June. As the clock struck twelve, and the last footfall of the old year died away, Edward put out his hand to take mine, and said:

'A happy New Tear it will surely be to us, my Laura, for we shall spend more than half of it together;' and I echoed his 'happy New Year' without a dread. I knew the storm was coming; I feared its fury; but I thought myself too secure, too near a haven to be lost; how could I know that the brave ship was destined to go down in sight of land?

And yet I might have known it. For I came from the North, which was, and is my home; and he was a Southern man. His family owned property and slaves in Georgia; and, though Mr. Mayne's political career had prevented their living there much, they considered it their home. One of the sons, who was married, lived on the plantation, and managed it well; the slaves were comparatively happy, and there were strong ties between them, their master and his family. My sister, who was delicate, had spent a winter in Florida, and I had accompanied her there. On our way home we paid a visit to the Mayne plantation; my sister enjoyed herself very much there, and was pro-slavery from that time; I was then sixteen, and had always hated it, and what with my fears of snakes, and my dislike of the black servants, whom I thought either inefficient or impertinent, and my unconquerable liking for freedom, I was not so fascinated. Edward Mayne himself did not like a planter's life, and he thought slavery an evil, but an evil inherited and past curing. He argued that the disease was not mortal and endurable, and that it would kill the country to use the knife. His youngest sister and I were the only two who ever discussed the subject; she talked a great deal of nonsense, and probably I did, too; and as she always lost her temper, I thought it wiser to let the subject drop, especially as I did not think about it a great deal, and it annoyed Edward to have any coolness between Georgy and me, and he himself never discussed the topic. We were both very young and very happy, too young and thoughtless to care much for any great question, so we sang our little song of happiness, and its music filled our ears until it was no longer possible not to hear the tumult of the world without.

The first day of January was our last day of perfect peace. Those who had not thought of the question before had now to answer what part they meant to take. People discussed less what States would secede, and more what they would themselves do, and many who are now most firm on one side or the other were then agitated by doubt and indecision. Events did not tarry for individual minds. We all know the story now; I need not repeat it. Still my future seemed unchanged, and I went to New York the third of January to order my wedding clothes, but I stayed only three or four days; I was restless for the continued excitement of Washington. The day I came back Mississippi seceded, and with it went Mr. Davis. I heard him make that farewell speech which so few listened to unmoved, and at which I cried bitterly. I went to say good by to him, though I could not say God speed, for already I was beginning to know that I had principles, and which side they were on. As we parted, he said, in that courteous way that has made so many bow at his shrine:

'We shall have you in the South very soon, Miss Laura,' and I did not say no; but the mist lifted suddenly before my eyes, and I saw the rock on which my life was to split, and that no striving against the stream would avail me aught. Still I said nothing, and the days flew swiftly by on restless wings; days so full of excitement that they seemed to take years with them in their flight.

It was a lovely morning in February; the air had already a May softness in it, and the crocuses were bright in the grounds of the Capitol, when Edward and I went to take our favorite walk, and there, in sight of the broad river which is now a world-known name of division, he told me he had made up his mind to leave the army; that there might be fighting, and he could not fight against his own people, whom he believed to be in the right; that he thought it more honorable to resign at that moment than to wait until the hour of need. I could not oppose him, for I knew he thought he was doing his duty. I remembered how different his opinions were from mine, and that his whole system of education had trained him in dissimilar ideas of right from those held in the North. Georgia was his country, for which he lived, and for which he thought he ought to die, if need were. The shackles of inherited prejudices trammelled his spirit, as they might have trammelled the spirit of a wiser man, who could have shaken them off in the end; but my lover was not wide-minded, and had not the clear sight that sees over and beyond these petty lives of ours that are as nothing in the way of a great principle and a God-bidden struggle; his eyes saw only what they had been taught to see—his home, in its greenness and beauty, not the dank soul-malaria, to which, alas! so many of us are acclimated.

He resigned, and his resignation was accepted without delay or difficulty, as were all resignations in those days. The spring began to break in all its glory, and the grass grew green in Virginia, on fields that were trampled and bloody before that battle summer was over. The little wren sang again its song. This year a song of promise—of promise never to be fulfilled!

For the news of Sumter came, and the North rose with a cry, and my heart leaped up within me with a thrill stronger and deeper and more masterful than any mere personal feeling can ever give; a feeling that rules my soul to-day even as it ruled in that first excited hour.

Edward went South, and I let him go alone. I could not, I would not go with him. I had no sympathy, no tenderness, scarcely forgiveness for the men who had brought the evil upon us. We parted lovers, hoping for days of peace, and sure of reunion when those days should come; and every night and every morning I prayed for him; but first I prayed for the safety of my country, and the victory of our cause.

Time crept on. The battle of Bull Run was fought; he was engaged in it, and for many, many days I never knew whether he was living or dead. In the autumn I heard he had been ordered West, and that winter was a time of anxious days and restless nights. I never heard from him, and I did not think it fair to write; occasionally I heard of him through an aunt of his, who lived in Maryland, but she was gall and bitterness itself on the political question, and never let me know anything she could possibly keep from me. So my life passed in fruitless wondering and bitter suspense; I never saw a soldier without thinking of Edward, and my dreams showed him to me wounded, ill, or dying. No; the dead may make their voices heard across the gulf that parts us from them, but not the absent, or his soul would have heard my 'exceeding loud and bitter cry,' and hearing, must have come.

I must not dwell on this. The days rolled on, and spring brightened the air, the grass was green again, the dying hope in my heart revived, and I listened again to the wren's song, and thought it yet promised a summer for my life. But that was the year of the Peninsular campaign, and the dying leaves fell on the graves of our bravest and brightest, and the autumn wind sighed a lamentation in our ears, and our hearts were mourning bitterly for the defeats of the summer, and no less bitterly for the dear-bought glory of Antietam. And winter came again: hope fled with the swallows, and my youth began to leave me.

In the late autumn I went to New York, to pay a visit to a friend. One night I went with my brother to the theatre. The play was stupid, and the entr'actes were long. In the middle of the second act, while some horrible nonsense was being talked upon the stage, I looked around the theatre, and saw no face I had ever seen before, when a lady near me moved her fan, and, a little distance beyond her, I saw—with a start I saw—the face that was never long absent from my thoughts. Changed and older, and brown and bearded; but I knew him; and he knew me, and smiled; and there was no doubt in my mind. I was not even surprised. But to the sickness of sudden joy soon succeeded the sickness of apprehension. What brought him there? And what would be done to him if he were discovered? How could I see him and speak to him? Oh! could it be possible that we might not meet more nearly! I wonder I did not die during that quarter of an hour. I turned and looked at my brother; his eyes were fixed upon the stage, and he was as curiously unmoved as if the world were still steady and firm beneath my feet.