history.  None who witnessed it will ever forget that spectacle, of men of all races and color, of all creeds and traditions, assembled together as brothers and fellow-subjects, to do honor to a woman’s gracious sway of sixty years.  And is there not a deep significance in the fact that these men of warring creeds and opposed traditions came together to do homage to no commanding personality, no Semiramis or Boadicea of old, no Catherine of Russia or Elizabeth of England; but to a sovereign whose chief characteristic has been that of being a true woman, with a true woman’s instinctive sagacity and wisdom of the heart:  a woman with no glamour of youth and beauty, but bowed with the weight of years and widowhood and cares of State; a Queen who, on the morning of her crowning triumph, sent forth no royal proclamation couched in set and pompous periods, but laid her trembling hands on the bowed head of her people, and gave them a simple mother’s blessing:  “Tell my beloved people that I pray from the bottom of my heart that God may bless them”?

May I not take it as the very embodiment of all that I have been urging on the women of this day, the immense possibilities of good that lie latent in our womanhood, the vast issues of good to the nation, and through it to the world, if that womanhood is only true to itself?

For let us clearly realize that this great moral question is no question confined to the narrow limits of the home, but a question of the rise and fall of nations.  This is a truism of history.  All history teaches us that the welfare and very life of a nation is determined by moral causes; and that it is the pure races that respect their women and guard them jealously from defilement that are the tough, prolific, ascendant races, the noblest in type and the most fruitful in propagating themselves.  You will never find a permanently progressive race where the position of women is low, the men libertine, and the state of society corrupt.  What was it that made the most brilliant civilization the world has ever seen—­the civilization which still gives us the inexhaustible wells of our intellectual life—­what was it that made it the shortest-lived?  Few, I think, would deny that the rapid decadence of Greece, despite her splendid intellectual life, was due to moral causes.  Not the pure, but the impure—­the brilliant Hetairae—­were the companions of men, and the men themselves were stained with nameless vices.  Speaking of the decay of the Athenian people, Mr. Francis Galton says:  “We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvellously gifted race declined.  Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became unfashionable and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans, and consequently infertile; and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class."[38] What was it that made the Egyptian civilization one of the longest-lived of ancient civilizations?