The democracy of women’s organizations was shown at the meeting in London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where delegates from twenty-one countries assembled.  One of the great features of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of women’s trades and professions.  An immense procession of women, bearing banners and emblems of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the world was reserved for them.  A published account of the pageant, after describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists, artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and others well known here, says: 

Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle came the chain makers who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the mines,—­women whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal dust until they can never be washed white....  To these women, the hardest workers in the land, were given the seats of honor, while behind them, gladly taking a subordinate place, were many women wearing gowns with scarlet and purple hoods, indicating their university degrees.

Every public movement—­reform, philanthropic, sanitary, educational—­now asks the co-operation of women’s organizations.  The United States Government asked the co-operation of the women’s clubs to save the precarious Panama situation.  At a moment when social discontent threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York, to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government employees into clubs.  The Department knew that the clubs, once organized, would do the rest.  Nor was it disappointed.

The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of conserving natural resources.  At the biennial of the Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry, a movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.  Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations.  As soon as it reached the Government that the women’s clubs were paying fifty dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to lecture on forestry free of all expense.

But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women’s organizations.  If the Government approves their interest in public questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it.  The president of the Manufacturers’ Association, in his inaugural address, told his colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs.  He warned them that the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the association frowned upon.