genius of its womanhood and homes. And when a woman does these
things, as called of God--not talks of them, as to whether she may
make claim to do them--she carries a weight from the very sanctity
out of which she steps, as woman, that moves men unlike the moving
of any other power. Shall she resign the chance of doing really
great things, of meeting grand crises, by making herself common in
ward-rooms and at street-corners, and abolishing the perfect idea
of home by no longer consecrating herself to it?

If individual woman, as has been said, may gain and influence
individual man, and so the man-power in affairs--a body of women,
purely as such, with cause, and plea, and reason, can always have
the ear and attention of bodies of men; but to do this they must
come straight from their home sanctities, as representing them--as
able to represent them otherwise than men, because of their
hearth-priestesshood; not as politicians, bred and hardened in the
public arenas.

That the family is the heart of the state, and that the state
is but the widened family, is the fact which the old vestal
consecration, power, and honor set forth and kept in mind.

The voice which has of late been so generally conceded to women in
town, decisions as regarding public schools, is an instance of the
fittingness of relegating to them certain interests of which they
should know more than men, because--applying the key-test with
which we have started--it has direct relation to and springs from
their motherhood. But can one help suggesting that if the movement
had been to place women, merely and directly, upon the committees,
by votes of men who saw that this work might be in great part best
done by them; if women had asked and offered for the place without
the jostle of the town-meeting, or putting in that wedge for
the ballot--the thing might have been as readily done, and the
objection, or political precedent, avoided.

It is not the real opportunity, when that arises or shows itself
in the line of her life-law, that is to be refused for woman. It
is the taking from internal power to add to external complication
of machinery and to the friction of strife. Let us just touch
upon some of the current arguments concerning these external
impositions which one set is demanding and the other entreating