Japan, South Australia, Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria, Hawaiian Islands, South Africa, and Mexico. *

This world's petition first emanated from the White Ribboners of the United States, but has become truly a worldwide possession and undertaking. The president, Miss Willard, thus writes: "It is intended that the whole force of this world's union of women shall be turned upon international questions affecting social and temperance reforms. As one of the instruments to this end, the great petition gives a practical direction to the new world-sense that thrills the hearts of women in this last decade of our century. It calls for no money, it even demands no personal pledge from those who sign or indorse it, but it only asks that the nations of the world may put away the unholy traffic in alcohol and opium with which every Christian nation is more or less in complicity.

"The circulation of this petition must in the very nature of things cause an arrest of thought wherever it goes, and aid us, as Christian women, banded together in the belief that our united faith and works will, with God's blessing, prove helpful in creating a strong public sentiment in favor of personal purity of life, including total abstinence from all narcotic poisons, and the protection of the home by outlawing the traffic in alcoholic liquors, opium, tobacco, and impurity."

A petition nearly twelve miles long, signed in well-nigh fifty languages, carrying already almost two million names, "and which it is hoped will have double that number before it is called in for exhibition at the World's Fair in 1893, preparatory to setting forth on its world-wide mission to the rulers of all nations, will be in itself a vast object-lesson, crystalizing into one burning focus the hopes and prayers, the agony and tears of wives and mothers, sisters and

* It is impossible to give space to the particular report presented of the temperance work in each of the countries named; and such reports more properly belong to the unabridged record of the Congress, which is to be published by the United States Government.

daughters around the globe, and it might well be a spectacle on which angels should gaze with sympathy."

Perhaps the best work done in any one country in the circulation and obtaining signatures to the world's petition is that accomplished by Miss G. F. Morgan of Brecon, South Wales, throughout Great Britain. So zealous were her efforts that Lady Henry Somerset was able to carry the signatures of two hundred and fifty thousand persons with her, to be presented as England's contribution to the world's petition work, when she went to America to attend the first World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union convention in 1891.

I close in Mrs. Leavitt's words: "If there was in the beginning any doubt as to the feasibility of Miss Willard's grand conception, it must have long since passed away. The White Ribbon has belted the world. The noontide prayer never ceases." The World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union is an accomplished fact.

N. B. The summary of temperance work in other countries will be found in the Appendix.-[THE EDITOR.]

CHAPTER VIII. THE CIVIL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN.

PREFATORY COMMENT BY THE EDITOR - EXTRACTS FROM ADDREsses DeliverED IN THE GENERAL CONGRESS AND FROM DISCUSSIONS OF SAID ADDRESSES BY MRS. JACOB BRIGHT, FLORENCE FENWICK MILLER, THE COUNTESS OF ABERDEEN, LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE, FRANCES E. W. HARPER, MARGARET WINDEYER, J. ELLEN FOSTER, REV. EUGENIA T. ST. JOHN, MARY FROST ORMSBY, IDA A. HARPER, LILLIAN DAVIS DUNCANSON, LAURA M. JOHNS, SARAH C. HALL, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, AND MARTHA STRICKLAND - ExTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN THE DEPARTMENT CONGRESS OF THE NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND HELEN H. GARDENER EXTRACTS FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE DEPARTMENT CONGRESS of the ORDER OF THE EASTERN STAR BY MARY A. FLINT-EXTRACTS FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE DEPARTMENT CONGRESS OF THE LOYAL WOMEN OF AMERICAN LIBERTY BY ABBIE A. C. PEASLIE - EXTRACTS FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE DEPARTMENT CONGRESS OF THE WOMEN'S NATIONAL INDIAN ASSOCIATION BY MRS. WILLIAM E. BURKE - EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN THE REPORT CONGRESS BY THE COUNTESS OF ABERDEEN, THE BARONESS ALEXANDRA GRIPENBERG, AND THE BARONESS THORBORG-RAPPE.

O

NE still frequently hears that the cause popularly known as the "Woman's Rights Movement" has made little progress; that the interest in it, always limited to a small and peculiar class, has grown languid even within that class; that the majority of men hold in contempt claims and aspirations which the majority of women regard with indifference. These assertions are made in the face of such facts and conditions as are presented in this chapter. Here we find representatives of countries as remote and as different from one another as Sweden and the United States, Scotland and Australia, Finland and England, telling, with variations but slightly accentuated by nationality and form of government, the