and cultural programs? Will these rights be given to us so that we stand with folded arms, and they remain confined to one group of us and no other? It is our duty, then, to demand the strengthening and gathering of our elements, and generous expenditure for the raising of cultivated generations fit to receive these rights.

We demand rights and do not heed them; we demand equality with man and do not make ourselves equal. We must cast off critical gossip and the weakness that rules over us, after the example of men; we must value national feeling and the political struggle of the nation, and plant it in the hearts and minds of the daughters of our sex; we must strive and search and seek to clarify matters, and not pass over them superficially without understanding them.

Our political guidance we must attend to by the inspiration of creeds, principles, and national feeling — not submit to outside hearsay and let it rule over us. We must value the educated at their true worth, and strive that the strugglers be given their due; we must draw our politics from our national heroes and their struggle, and from the good of our people and of our downtrodden sex — from the condition of the wretched, ignorant, ailing people, from reli-gion and lofty principles and the public interest. For this poor people has tried the men, and it now hopes for mercy and compassion from the women! — that this may be a seed for the crushing of ignorance and disease.

Would that our government were so kind as to establish, in all parts of Lebanon, cultural clubs to guide us in sound political guidance, that this might be a spur for whetting ambitions and ripening a true national consciousness, so that this homeland may rise by the efforts of its women matched equally with its men? That is the answer the days to come will bring us — and he who lives shall see.