the fever-tossed body. They braved the small-pox and the typhus and the yellow fever, and their unmarked graves are on every battlefield of the South. A wealthy widow in New York City accompanied her only son to a fitting-out store, bought him the finest clothes and the best arms and accoutrements, saying: "Go, my son; it is all I can do." When Governor Harvey was drowned while looking after the Wisconsin troops after the battle of Pittsburg Landing, Mrs. Harvey took his place and spent the entire period of the war on the battle-fields and in the military hospitals at the front.

The genius for organization animated and inspired all their efforts. Untried, and without business experience, without capital and without credit, they projected mighty enterprises, and counted their profits by the million. "There was nothing wanting in the plans of the women," said Dr. Bellows, of the Christian Commission, "that business men commonly think peculiar to their own methods.” Their resources were inexhaustible, their energy never flagged, and their faith in the ultimate triumph of the Union cause never wavered. The darker the hour, the brighter the hope; the greater the demands, the better were they prepared to meet them.

The active young women were at work in the sewing room at the head centers of supply and relief. The aged grandmothers knitted the socks and mittens. Even the children poured their pennies into the common fund.

No emergency was sudden enough to take them unawares. An order reached Boston for five thousand shirts for the Massachusetts troops in the South. Every church sent its quota of seamstresses to Union Hall, and in five days the shirts were on the way. After the battle of Nashville, Dr. Read, of the Sanitary Commission, telegraphed to Cleveland, Chicago and Cincinnati, "The weather is very cold; many of your soldiers shouldering your guns for you are without gloves and mittens, will you help them, and send at once by express?" Cleveland alone sent one thousand, six hundred and seventy pairs of mittens.

For a month after the battle of Franklin there was great suffering among the eighteen hundred wounded soldiers which the government had no means to alleviate. Dr. Woods, surgeon in charge, sent an appeal for "clothing, nourishment, dressings, stimulants, almost any amount for the destitute, wounded men." The next day the sanitary trains were dispatched for their relief.

Occasionally you hear some hearty fellow who was so lucky as never to have been sick or wounded say, "there might have been some good done by the Sanitary Commission, but for his part he never saw any." He is like the man one sometimes meets who did not go to the war because his "wife would not give her consent."

Both reason from false premises. Sanitary supplies were not intended for the men stout enough to chew hard-tack and lead the pioneer corps, and the army had no use for a man who waited to secure his wife's consent.

Some idea of the magnitude of women's work during the war may be gleaned from the history of the Soldiers' Aid Society, with headquarters at Cleveland. With five hundred and twentyfive branches in the small area of eighteen counties of Northern Ohio, this society. beginning with two gold dollars, raised and dispensed hospital stores amounting to nearly one million dollars, built and supported a Soldiers' Home, and conducted a special Relief Bureau and Employment Agency, from which sixty thousand Union soldiers and their families received aid and comfort, and a Claim Agency which gratuitously collected war claims aggregating three hundred thousand dollars, at a saving to claimants of seventeen thousand dollars

What was true of Northern Ohio was true the country over. In Philadelphia, that mighty thoroughfare of passing troops, there was maintained a standing army of devoted women for four years and a half. arising at the tap of the bell, at any hour of the night, to dispense hot coffee, medicines and food.

All over the land, wherever a soldier train halted, or a squad of sick and wounded passed along, were the loyal women with their baskets and stores. Battalions, regiments, whole brigades, were supplied with basins of water to cleanse their dust-stained faces, and then with dishes of wholesome food and barrels of steaming coffee.

March 4th, 1863, the message flashed over the lines, "General Grant's army in danger of scurvy; rush forward the anti-scorbutics." The previous summer had been one of great draught in the Northwest; the vegetable crop was short and the Government had tried in vain to buy.

When the call came, the whole Northwest was a sea of mire below and a water-spout above, but with the watchword, "Our sol

diers do not stop for mud or rain," the women of the Aid Societies went forth. Every house was visited; the careful housewife brought out the little sack of dried fruit; the farmer measured up his seed onions, and the army at Vicksburg received supplies at the rate of a thousand barrels a week. From January to July nearly twenty thousand bushels of vegetables and over sixty thousand pounds of dried fruit were shipped from Chicago alone. Every kitchen became a supply depot for the war. For every three jars of fruit or pickles put up by the anxious housewife for the family at home, two of them were more than likely to be smuggled to the Soldiers' Aid Rooms, to be packed for the Sanitary Commission.

Abraham Lincoln at a meeting in Washington, held in the interest of the United States Sanitary Commission, used these memorable words:

"I am not accustomed to the language of eulogy, I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women, but must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women was applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct in this war."

In one of his latest addresses, General Logan said: "I have seen Mother Bickerdyke helping wounded soldiers from the field when shot and shell were raining around her, and when I speak of her I speak of her as typifying the women who helped the soldier in the war; tall and muscular, she would take a wounded boy in her arms and carry him to the hospital. I was once a sufferer on the battlefield and long afterwards, and every morning I could feel as if a silver cord were twined around a capstan in the regions of glory and reached to my heart where it was anchored by the hand of woman.”

Mrs. Logan was herself of this type. If the soldier cheers go up wherever she appears, it is not alone that her gallant husband was the typical American soldier, but because in her own splendid personality is summed up all that is excellent in American womanhood. For more than twenty years she has conducted a private pension bureau at Washington, and there has been no veteran so obscure, no unhappy, hunted woman so distressed, but that the helping hand of Mary A. Logan has been extended and the word. of comfort spoken.

Mother Bickerdyke on the battle-fields of the West; Dorothea Dix in the hospitals and on the battle-fields around Washington; Clara Barton in the loathsome prison pens, numbering the graves, and communicating with the bleeding hearts at home; Annie Wittenmeyer, organizing the Diet Kitchens, and restoring thousands of trained soldiers to their comrades; these are types of the women of whom the lips of Lincoln were powerless to speak and Logan uttered his sweetest eulogies. These are types of the women who, aged and friendless and in need, have been knocking, lo these many years, at the door of Congress, asking the meager pension of twenty-five dollars a month to help them from the alms houses and the charity hospitals in their declining years; untitled, unpensioned, their deeds unrecorded and their graves unmarked, they will afford for all time examples of the sublimest fortitude and the most heroic devotion of the great crisis of 1861-65. Their sacrifices are not emblazoned on hammered brass, or their bowed forms moulded into effigies of bronze and marble, but the guiding impulses of a loftier humanity is from the seed of their sowing; and their songs of triumph are chanted in the anthems of a race redeemed.

With the close of the war the Union soldier bent his matchless energies to the cultivation of a lasting peace, while, in ameliorating the sufferings of his unfortunate comrades, his boundless sympathies have formed an ever widening field. Woman has supplemented all his efforts as in days of war, and to-day we have the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization springing in five years from a band of 28 to a host of 65,000, having expended a quarter of a million dollars in alleviating the necessities of the old soldier and his family, and all-powerful in resources for any emergency that may arise.

The American Branch of the Red Cross Society, fixing its blessed symbol on the sleeve of every arm of the surgical department of the United States army, has been established in recent years, through the efforts of Clara Barton. Thus, through woman's influence, America is at last squarely in line with the score or more of Christian countries, combined to divest war of its greatest horror, and opening the lines of contending armies to every bearer of the red cross of relief.

In fire and flood, in earthquakes and fevers, and in all public calamities, the forces of the new crusade are ready to follow their holy emblem.

The magnificent army of temperance reform, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, girdling the earth with its white ribbon of social purity; the great boards of Missions that are opening the harems and zananas of the old world to the glories of Christian womanhood; these and scores of kindred beneficences are the results of the systematic training to which the loyal women of America were subjected in our long and bloody war.

There has been no depth so deep, no hight so far uplifted, but the loyal woman has compassed it. She was the first among the Freedmen of the South, enduring the odium attaching to those who led that degraded people from a worse than Egyptian bondage. She formed the first Soldiers' Orphan Home, following the war, converting the Government Barracks in Iowa to educational uses. Orphan's Homes, Soldiers' Homes, Asylums and Hospitals are under her fostering care. She is carrying forward the kindergartens of American patriotism, and last year, through her efforts, one hundred thousand children joined with reverent hearts and voices in the sacred services of Memorial Day.

To man war has an inspiring aspect. The bugle blast fills his soul with lofty ambition, and stirs his courage to superhuman phases. To woman war is an unutterable evil, drinking with insatiable maw oceans of tears and blood, and yet the cry is "more."

With the constant prayer in her heart that bloodshed will forever cease, do you wonder that woman yearns, with longings unutterable, for the time when the sword shall be beaten into the plowshare, and the spear into the pruning hook?

But until then whenever law is in the jaws of anarchy, and mercy is crushed beneath the foot of the oppressor, will woman follow her husband and brother to the sauguinary breach. When he enlists for the war, her vows will be registered with his and to her will be the joy of rejoicing in his triumph, or of comforting his soul in the pangs of defeat.

66

The President:-Ladies and Gentlemen, I have now reached the fifth regular toast, The War as an Educator." This toast was to have been responded to by General McNulta, a member of our Society, radient, enthusiastic, and always present when he can possibly attend. But to-day he telegraphed to General Fuller from Chicago, these words: