"... It is this homeland's good fortune that you did not join your voice to man's voice in the past ages of our life! Providence has kept you in reserve for this grim day, that you might be the last attempt to save this people — great in the greatness of its past and its glories, and weak in the weakness of its present and its disgraces!..."

In a country where, over man's voice, have piled up the veils of private interests, and base wishes, and low aims, and ambitions with clipped wings — let me hear your voice, O woman! Your voice, whose clearness no waves of artificial swamps have muddied, nor the tremors stirred by the crocodiles as they pounce upon their prey! Your voice, which the clamor of hired demonstrators has not confounded, nor the vexing rattle of those who trade in shots of gunpowder! Your voice, which was never put up for sale in the slave-dealers' markets, never debased in the forgers' exchanges, and never grew faint before the tyranny of the oppressing colonizers! Your voice is still a captive in your heart. And is there any heart purer than yours among the hearts of a nation such as this?! Your heart — man tried to exploit it and enslave it, and his attempt stretched over long centuries; and when man went bankrupt in his attempts, he turned back upon his own self: doubling its falsehood and its calumny, cultivating its weakness and its meanness, and defiling its sound parts, until, in our day, it made its accursed historic leap! Your voice, O woman citizen, is the voice of man's innate freedom, which the centuries have preserved in their pure hiding places, that it might save this people from its social defilements, rarely matched in the world! Your voice is the voice of truth, veiled in noble feeling, perfumed with pure wishes, winged with lofty ambitions; man's respect for his own humanity has preserved it, and love and the sense of duty shall release it from its holy of holies! It is this homeland's good fortune that you did not join your voice to man's voice in the past ages of our life! Providence has kept you in reserve for this grim day, that you might be the last attempt to save this people — great in the greatness of its past and its glories, and weak in the weakness of its present and its disgraces! Blessed be Providence, which has kept you in our reserve lines! Blessed be genius, of which

only parts have destroyed themselves, for it does not wish to die out in this great people!

*

When I searched, O woman citizen, for the hiding places of strength and immortality and honor and dignity, I found them nowhere but in your heart! The heart is what moves humanity toward its highest ideals; it is the strongest impulse to immortal sacrifices and glorious deeds! Does man boast to you of the wealth his mind produces? And was the mind ever anything but the heart's obedient instrument, carrying out its supreme decrees and submitting to its adventurous, creative passions! But for the heart's heroic adventures, would the mind have been anything more than an inventor shrunken within his secrets, adding figures to figures, and measures to measures, and elements to elements, until he formed from them natural facts that increase this human creature's information, and increase his heart in nothing but reticence and constriction?

*

Man's heart has died in our people, O woman citizen! So you have been summoned to mount the throne of sovereignty! And the nation awaits your bold daring, that you may take over the responsibilities of this sovereignty! Your heart, O woman citizen, is the pulse of life in a people that has lain in its death throes for generations and centuries!

What virtue among the virtues has not burst forth from this great human heart!

Nay, what heroism has the heart not ventured upon, generous and bold?!

Nay, what great sacrifice has the heart not given gladly, even while floundering in its own blood and its death agony?!

You have awakened, O woman citizen, and risen to demand your full right in life, after man monopolized this right for thousands of years until he made of it a treading-ground for the feet of usurpers and coveters, and a bargaining commodity in the hands of the oppressors, the colonizers! Your right to life — man made of it a means to enslave you and to enslave himself!

Rise, then, and wrest from him your right and his, for he is not worthy of the rights of man!