mighty movement on earth, woman is at the bottom, and the problem which more than any other agitates this whole country to-day, is because of woman. She can wreck this nation, and she can deliver it. Man fought to save it; woman prays, teaches, suffers and sacrifices to save it. One day at the South, while on a solitary walk, I stepped through the crazy paling, and spoke to a jolly black woman who was getting dinner in the yard just before the front door. She was about forty-five, with a superb physique, quite unfettered by fashion, for she wore but one garment, which did not hang in flounces, but in strings. The fire, or rather smoke, for I saw no fire, puffed up from a little heap of sticks, and over this swung a broken kettle, which, apart from the gourds lying about, was the only dish of the household. Into this kettle she had put a piece of grimy salt pork, with a share of bristles remaining on it, making a firm rind, and with it turnip-tops and cabbage-stumps, and she was then washing sweet potatoes; and such a nest of children in every stage of dirt and nakedness and hunger, and every one in densest ignorance and heathenism! The little hut couldn’t hold them, so they were ranged inside the paling, all in a row, forming a kind of animated hedge, their little bare, shining bodies flashing as they whisked in the sun, their big, round eyes gleaming with curiosity, and every single body of them poised to turn a somersault or two and ask me for a penny. The woman made a low courtesy, and a graceful one it was, and as I greeted the children the whole batch of them squealed and cackled, stood on their heads and came right side up with the wildest kind of a grin, in my very face. “How many children have you,” I asked. “These are not all yours?” “Yis, ma’am, dey is ebery one mine. I’se got fourteen.” “Is your husband at home?” I inquired. I thought I spied a man in the cabin. “He’s sick mos’ times,” she replied, “a’nt good for not’in’ but eat; he kin eat mo’n any nigger in all Car’line, though he don’ git de luck berry offen, dere’s so many ob us,” and she gave a chuckle. “But how do you take care of so many?” was my question, as the vision of more than one overworked mother at the North, with her solitary child, flashed across me. Such a loud, musical laugh! “Why, bress yer soul, honey, I don’ car’ ob dem, dey takes car’ ob demselves,” and she leaned back and again she sang and rippled and rolled at the absurd idea of a mother’s taking care of her children. I ask you to-day, what do you expect those children will do and become? It is for you to say.