form. I believe this is the very
first occasion when the Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen have pushed
out from their own ancient hall into the world to give a larger
welcome to their constantly growing and most admirable and enviable
constituents. I was wondering to-night how many of the young men and
of the young women before me here had enjoyed the facilities of this
institution in the times past. I am sure they would have to take a
hall that would hold six or seven hundred people, who would fill it
full just as this place is filled full, and to-night this is just as
full as our old hall over home has been during the past five or six
years. We should fill anything because if our friends know they can
come and get away alive, they will come, but if they think they are
going to sweat nearly to death, and be crushed to death, possibly
there will a great many of them stay away.

I want to congratulate these young ladies. There is one matter that
was referred to in the salutatory this evening,--there is one aspect
of your work and of your success to-night that strikes me. Happy is
the institution that puts a class of fifty young ladies year after
year into the position which those young ladies occupy who have
finished their course, and to-night are to receive their diplomas. Oh,
I do not wonder, after what I know about life in New York City, and
life among women and girls, that your doors are crowded every fall and
that you have two, and three, and four times the applicants for the
facilities and opportunities of the school that you can possibly
accommodate. I do not wonder at it. Why I know a woman 36 years of age
with four children whom she is trying to support, and who works eleven
hours a day for six days of the week, and barely makes an average of
sixty cents a day, and on Saturday night gets six times six or
thirty-six,--$3.60 for her week's toil, and she has been at it till
eleven at night, starting soon after six in the morning. Just think of
a story like that. Oh, girls, I will call you girls; young ladies, if
you had rather be called young ladies, I pray you never forget the
sisters and the mothers who are toiling like this. They were just as
bright girls, and just as brave girls when they were girls as you are
now, and yet life has crowded them down, and I do not know how we are
to lift them up, but, by a tremendous concentration of all of our
consciences and all our powers, which shall make a public sentiment