In October our mother wrote to Aaron Powell, president of the American Peace Society: "The issue is one which will unite virtually the whole sex. God gave us, I think, the word to say, but it ought to be followed by immediate and organizing action.... Now, you, my dear sir, are bound, as a Friend and as an Advocate of Peace, to take especial interest in this matter, so I call upon you a little confidently, hoping that you will help my unbusinesslike and unskilful hands to go on with this good work. I wish to avoid occasioning any confusion in the different meetings and organizations of the Woman Suffrage Movement. But I should wish to move for various meetings in which the matter of my appeal, the direct intervention of Woman in the Pacification of the World, should be discussed, and the final move of a general Congress promoted. Please take hold a little now and help me. I have wings but no feet nor hands--rather, only a voice, '_vox et praeterea nihil_.'" The next step was to call together those persons supposedly interested in such a movement. In December, 1870, it was announced that a meeting "for the purpose of considering and arranging the steps necessary to be taken for calling a World's Congress of Women in behalf of International Peace" would be held in Union League Hall, Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, New York, on Friday, December 23. The announcement, which sets forth the need for and objects of such a congress, is signed by Julia Ward Howe, William Cullen Bryant, and Mary F. Davis. The meeting was an important one: there were addresses by Lucretia Mott, Octavius Frothingham, and Alfred Love, the Peace prophet of Philadelphia; letters from John Stuart Mill, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Howard Furness, who adjures peace-lovers to "labor for the establishment of a Supreme Court to which all differences between nations shall be referred for settlement." Mrs. Howe made the opening address, from which we quote these words:-- "So I repeat my call and cry to women. Let it pierce through dirt and rags--let it pierce through velvet and cashmere. It is the call of humanity. It says: 'Help others, and you help yourselves.'" * * * * * "Let the woman seize and bear about the prophetic word of the hour, and that word becomes flesh, and dwells among men. This rapturous task of hope, this perpetual evangel of good news, is the woman's special business, if she only knew it. "Patience and passivity are sometimes in place for women--not always. I think of this when I go to women, intelligent and charming, who warn me off with white hands, unaccustomed to any graver labor than that of gesticulation. 'Don't ask me to work,' they say; 'I cannot do it. God always raises up a set of people to do these things, like the Anti-Slavery people, and they set to work to do them.' And then I want to say to these friends: 'God can raise you up too, and I hope He will.'