unless it can be based and builded on the kind of life-work that helps to make a real prosperity; that really goes to the building and safe-keeping of a whole nation of such homes.”  Would there be no power in that?  Would it not be a kind of woman-suffrage to settle the very initials of all that ever bears upon the public question?  And to bring that sort of woman on the stage, and to the front, is there not enough work to do, and enough “higher education” to insist on and secure?

After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such existence as they could arrange without us.  In blessed homes, or in scattered dissipations of show, amusement, or the worse which these shows and amusements are but terribly akin to, women give purpose to and direct the results of all men’s work.  If the false standards of living first urge them, until at length the horrible intoxication of the game itself drives them on further and deeper, are we less responsible for the last state of those men than for the first?

Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a simpler and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would take them anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more unmitigated evil?  Ah, there come both answer and errand again.  Raise the fallen—­at least save the growing womanhood—­stop the destruction that rushes accelerating on, before you challenge new difficulty and danger with an indiscriminate franchise.  Are not these bad women the very “plenty” that would out-balance you at the polls, if you persist in trying the “patch-and-plaster” remedy of suffrage and legislation?

Recognize the fact, the law, that your power, your high commission, is inward—­vital—­formative, and casual.  Bring all questions of choice or duty to this test, will it work at the heart of things, among the realities and forces?  Try your own life by this; remember that mere external is falsehood and death.  The letter killeth.  Give up all that is only of the appearance—­or even chiefly so, in conscious delight and motive—­in person, surrounding pursuit.  Let your self-presentation, your home-making and adorning, your social effort and interest, your occupation and use of talent, all shape and issue for the things that are essentially and integrally good, and that the world needs to have prevail.  Until you can do this, and induce such doing, it is of little use to clamor for mere outward right, or to contend that it would be rightly applied.

Work as you will, and widely as you can, for schools, in associations, in everything whose end is to teach, enlighten, enlarge women, and so the world.  Help and protect the industries of women; but keep those industries within the guiding law of woman-life.  Do not throw down barriers that take down safeguards with them; that make threatening breaches in the very social