And then something happened.  A great question arose in this country which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human question, and nothing but a question of humanity.  That was the slavery question.  And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the first time, that women became prominent in politics in America?  Not many women; those prominent in that day were so few that you can name them over in a brief catalogue, but, nevertheless, they then began to play a part in writing, not only, but in public speech, which was a very novel part for women to play in America.  After the Civil War had settled some of what seemed to be the most difficult legal questions of our system, the life of the Nation began not only to unfold, but to accumulate.  Life in the United States was a comparatively simple matter at the time of the Civil War.  There was none of that underground struggle which is now so manifest to those who look only a little way beneath the surface.  Stories such as Dr. Davis has told to-night were uncommon in those simpler days.  The pressure of low wages, the agony of obscure and unremunerated toil, did not exist in America in anything like the same proportions that they exist now.  And as our life has unfolded and accumulated, as the contacts of it have become hot, as the populations have assembled in the cities, and the cool spaces of the country have been supplanted by the feverish urban areas, the whole nature of our political questions has been altered.  They have ceased to be legal questions.  They have more and more become social questions, questions with regard to the relations of human beings to one another,—­not merely their legal relations, but their moral and spiritual relations to one another.  This has been most characteristic of American life in the last few decades, and as these questions have assumed greater and greater prominence, the movement which this association represents has gathered cumulative force.  So that, if anybody asks himself, “What does this gathering force mean,” if he knows anything about the history of the country, he knows that it means something that has not only come to stay, but has come with conquering power.

I get a little impatient sometimes about the discussion of the channels and methods by which it is to prevail.  It is going to prevail, and that is a very superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to mere social unrest.  It is not merely because the women are discontented.  It is because the women have seen visions of duty, and that is something which we not only cannot resist, but, if we be true Americans, we do not wish to resist.  America took its origin in visions of the human spirit, in aspirations for the deepest sort of liberty of the mind and of the heart, and as visions of that sort come up to the sight of those who are spiritually minded in America, America comes more and more into her birthright and into the perfection of her development.