Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference books, in circulation.  Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of the traveling libraries in Iowa alone.  After the traveling cases have been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that they want a permanent place in which to read and study.  Ohio has over a thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement their work.  Western States—­Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho—­have supplied reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.

One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement.  Something like forty of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of tuberculosis, are included.  This library, with a pretty complete tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs of each town.  Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which local health problems are discussed.  The Health Department of the General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and exhibits in every State.

Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what seems to them social chaos.  In practically every civilized country in the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organization to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and objects send delegates.  In the United States the council is made up of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.  More than a million and a half American women are affiliated.

Four hundred and twenty-six women’s organizations belong to the council in Great Britain.  In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has thirty-five.  Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.  In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, and every country in Europe.  The council, indeed, has no formal organization in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.  But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.  Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to ask for admission.  The President of the International Council of Women is the Countess of Aberdeen.  Titled women in every European country belong to their councils.  The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek council.

The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are associating themselves together in altruistic work.  Once every five years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.