hungry, to clothe those who are cold, but we applaud efforts which have for their object the removal of the barriers which interpose between clothing and nakedness, between subsistence and starvation.
"And, besides, is not the part which the English ladies have taken in the work of the League in perfect harmony with the mission of woman in society? There are fêtes, soirées, given to the free-traders;—eclat, warmth, and life are communicated by their presence to those great oratorical jousts in which the condition of the masses is discussed;—a magnificent prize is held out to the most eloquent orator, or to the most indefatigable defender of liberty.
"A philosopher has said, 'A people has only one thing to do, in order to develope in its bosom every virtue, every useful energy. It is simply to honour what is honourable, and to contemn what is contemptible.' And who is the natural dispenser of shame and of glory? Woman; woman, gifted with a tact so unerring for discriminating the morality of the end, the purity of the motive, the convenience of the method; woman, who, a simple spectator of our social struggles, is always in possession of an impartiality too often foreign to our sex; woman, whose sympathy, sordid interest, or cold calculation, never ices over—the sympathy for what is noble and beautiful; woman, in fine, who forbids by a tear, and commands by a smile.
"In former times the ladies crowned the conqueror of the tourney. Valour, address, clemency, became popularised by the intoxicating sound of their applause. In those times of trouble and of violence, in which brutal force overrode the feeble and the defenceless, it was a good thing to encourage the union of the generosity which is found in the courage and loyalty of the knight, with the rude manners of the soldier.
"What! because the times are changed; because the age is advanced; because muscular force has given place to moral energy; because injustice and oppression borrow other forms, and strife is removed from the field of battle to the conflict of ideas, shall the mission of woman be terminated? Shall she always be restricted to the rear to the social movement? Shall it be forbidden to her to exercise over new customs her benignant influence, or to foster under her regard the virtues of a more elevated order which modern civilisation has called into existence?
"No! this cannot be. There is no point in the upward movement of humanity at which the empire of woman stops for ever. As civilisation transforms and elevates itself, this empire must be transformed and elevated with it, not annihilated;—there would then be an inexplicable void in the social harmony, and in the providential order of things. In our days it pertains to woman to decree to mortal virtues,