the East to reach the springs of freedom and of a life worthy of honorable man.

I remember, and there rises before me, almost palpable, the vision of those hopes that were knotted amid the storms of traditions born of pitch-black ignorance — knotted and woven from the very heartstrings, to bring woman to where the call of the free and proud homeland summons her, and to where she is summoned by that independence of self which rises above absurdities and breaks free of narrow bounds.

Woman today must know that the blessing she enjoys was denied to her sister in the past — who yearned for that blessing: the blessing of freedom to learn and to work, the blessing of liberation from the conditions of ignorance, and the blessing of release from the prisons of dogmas and illusions. All she has to do today is to use this freedom well, for her own good and the good of her fellow citizens.

Roaming childhood, youth loiter-ing on the sidewalks, shouting in throats, filth in the alleys — all this comes of ignorance and of bad individual and social education.

Every social corruption goes back to bad education. Vinet, one of the French writers, said words to this effect:

"A people is worth what its women are worth."

Indeed, thinkers are agreed that the scale of every people balances with the scale of its women in point of education and refinement.

There is no escape, then, for woman from bearing the responsi-bility and shouldering its burdens, now that the prisons of degrada-tion and humiliation in which she was fettered in the past have been torn down, and the choking fog that had gathered on the horizon of her spirit has melted away.

Nothing hinders her from clearing her soul and lifting her spirit toward noble ideals, to embrace them and strive to attain them.

O woman! The holy oil is in the lamps of hearts, and they await good and true breaths from a life of honor to blaze up with light.

And the tree of education strikes its roots in the soil of the home whose mistress you are; then its branches spread out, in good or in corruption, according to the care they have received.

The best habits are first practiced by the child in the arms of women.

And high refinement does not spread through a nation if woman's every hem is not trimmed with sound taste and true love, and if her affections are not made tender with sure sympathy and with help free of ulterior motives.

Neither laws nor regulations alone reform peoples and set societies upright, unless they are supported by the powers of the individual — and behind them the hand of the wise woman, held out with polish, education, and refinement.