The very meager programme suggested here for our great day may appear to many Utopian and impossible. I shall be glad if it can serve to pave the way for kindred suggestions, to which individual minds may give a broader and more varied scope. Let us unite our efforts in behalf of a suitable and serious honoring of the day in such wise that every heart, old and young, shall have therein its especial joy, and every mind its especial lesson. I had at one time a plan of my own, of setting apart one day in the year as a Mother’s Day. This festival was to be held in the interest of a world’s peace, and for quite a number of years it was so observed by groups of women in various parts of the country, while in England and even in far-off Smyrna friends met together, with song, prayer, and earnest discourse to emphasize the leading thought, which was that women, as the mothers of the race, knowing fully the cost of human life, should unite their efforts throughout the world to restrain the horrors of war, and to persuade men to keep the sacred bond of peace. It now occurs to me that we should make our Fourth of July a Mother’s, as well as a Father’s day. In the public programme of every town throughout our vast Commonwealth, women should have some word to say and some part to play. What we have already seen of their culture and ability is enough to assure us that their participation in such proceedings would intensify their good features and discourage their objectionable ones. And as in the forms of oratory with which we are familiar, much is made of what the world owes to America, we might suggest that our women speakers might especially bring forward the antithesis of this question, in another, viz., What America owes to the world. II SPIRIT AND SIGNIFICANCE ENGLAND AND AMERICA BY JAMES BRYCE This is a memorable day to Englishmen as well as to Americans. It is to us a day both of regret and of rejoicing: of regret at the severance of the political connection which bound the two branches of our race together, and of regret even more for the unhappy errors which brought that severance about, and the unhappy strife by which the memory of it was embittered. But it is also a day of rejoicing, for it is the birthday of the eldest daughter of England—the day when a new nation, sprung from our own, first took its independent place in the world. And now with the progress of time, rejoicing has prevailed over regret, and we in England can at length join heartily with you in celebrating the beginning of your national life. All sense of bitterness has passed away, and been replaced by sympathy with all which this anniversary means to an American heart.