enduring hardships and afflic-tions, especially in conditions of pregnancy and sickness. Strict laws were then enacted in the civilized countries, absolutely for-bidding the employment of women in the carrying of heavy loads, or in the mines, or before the huge machines; and woman kept for herself the manual work that suits her particular inclinations and capacities and safeguards her health from the fearful dangers of mechanical civilization.

Then each country began to enact laws of social insurance, and Europe to this hour concerns itself with the worker, woman or man, as no age in its history has known, to restore to him his dig-nity as a true citizen in a nation that respects itself. With the dawn of the nineteenth century there appeared a body of laws relating to civil marriage and divorce, granting woman security under the shelter of justice and equality. In most European countries a woman retains, if she wishes, her nationality and the protection of her government even if she marries some foreigner; and often, if she wishes, she can confer the nationality of her country on her husband. All this to strengthen her position and help her stand fast before the calamities and misfortunes that beset her private life.

In most European countries there is a law protecting the illegitimate child and at the same time protecting the mother, entrusting to her his care until his sixteenth year and granting her financial rights to help her raise him; and if she marries again, the respon-sibility remains upon the intended husband until the child reaches the age at which he passes under the care of the authorities.

This is a swift glance at the civil laws touching woman in the social field. But what concerns us now directly is the development of these laws into wider fields,

granting woman her full political and economic rights and regard-ing her as the complementary half of civilization in the bosom of peoples that respect themselves.

The universal law followed by most of the peoples of Europe provided, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, that woman had no political rights whatsoever — unless she hap-pened to be born a queen. The history of the winning of these rights joins the curious to the painful. It happened, for example, that a social congress was held in London to examine matters con-cerning the child and woman, and the American delegation to this congress counted some women among its members. Whereupon the English delegation refused to proceed with the discussion in the presence of the feminine element, and compelled the American del-egation to keep the women in an adjoining room, separated from the main hall by some curtains, saying that the ladies might listen to the discussion, but we will on no account accept their taking part in it. This incident aroused the astonishment and disgust of the American women, who returned to America demanding the restoration of a right that had been usurped from them; and the first women's congress was held in 1838 under the patronage of the Society of "Friends" — the society that believed in the equal-ity of woman with man and was the pioneer in the fields of higher education for women, not only in America but in the Scandinavian countries and in England. This congress was followed by violent debates in the British Parliament, the greatest of them the precious defense delivered by the famous social writer "John Stuart Mill" in 1865, in whose wake was formed a working women's committee, which went on adding members by the hundreds and the thousands and laboring night and day to enlighten public opinion. This committee was presided over with firmness and ability by Lady "Garrett," who never for a moment neglected to send petitions, circulars, and proposals to Parliament, struggling with insistence and pressure to obtain all the political rights, whole and undiminished. In the wake of this was printed John Mill's well-known book, "The Subjection of Women," which raised a violent stir in European society and was translated into several languages, so that the

problem of woman passed beyond a single state or a single society and became the question of the whole continent. Yet these fierce campaigns yielded nothing more than the granting to woman of the right to elect members of the municipalities, and that was in 1869. As for Gladstone, who was Prime Minister at the time, he tried to concentrate his effort on the problems touching the Empire and neglected the domestic problems; but woman did not lose heart nor waver — she went on crying at the top of her voice in the streets, from the housetops, in gatherings and clubs, until the year 1907, when her candidacy for municipal office was achieved. And for the first time a woman took over a responsible post in the municipal-ity of London — she was called Mrs. Anderson. Then the English country came to the gates of new elections, and the British woman woke from the effect of the last opiate to recover her strength and launch a well-ordered assault of struggle for emancipation. London witnessed an all-embrac-ing demonstration: nearly 4,000 women massed in its streets, paralyzing traffic and upsetting order, drawing to themselves the passers-by from every side and letting them hear fiery speeches against the existing state of things. The leader of this movement and its beating pulse was Mrs. "Pankhurst," who in consequence endured, with a band of her friends, humiliation and pursuit and at last prison, where she went on hunger strike; and her act had its glorious effect upon the women strugglers — indeed upon public opinion as a whole. The newspapers, opposition and non-opposition alike, launched a fierce campaign against the authorities; you could hear the preachers, the professors in the institutes, the men of affairs, and the leaders of thought rebuking the government for its deed and demanding the emanci-pation of woman. The fires of a civil war nearly blazed up when the women marched

in a second demonstration far-ther-reaching in effect and wider in scope than the first. When the police barred its way, the women took to boats and sailed