Last month, taking the Past for a background, I tried to picture the opportunity which the Present holds up before the daughters of America. Let me now, for a brief space, coming freshly from the field of active service, where banners wave and squadrons wheel, try to talk about the conditions of success, in this wonderful battle of life. First, then, I would give this not at all startling bit of advice: _Keep to your specialty_; to the doing of the thing that you accomplish with most of satisfaction to yourself, and most of benefit to those about you. Keep to this, whether it is raising turnips or tunes; painting screens or battle pieces; studying political economy or domestic receipts; for, as we read in a great author who has a genius for common sense: “There is not one thing that men ought to do, there is not one thing that ought to be done, which a woman ought not to be encouraged to do, if she has the capacity for doing it. For wherever there is a gift, there is a prophecy pointing to its use, and a silent command of God to use it.” Such utterances as these are assertions of the “natural and inalienable rights” of the individual as such. They are deductions of the Christian philosophy which regards you and me, first and chiefly, as human beings, and makes the greatest possible account of personal identity. In all ages there have been minds that saw this truth. The intellects which towered like Alpine peaks above the mass of men, were the first to reflect its blessed light. Two thousand years ago, Juvenal made the heroine of a famous “Satire” say to the hero: “I like our Latin word for _man_, which equally includes your sex and mine. For you should not forget that, in all things highest, best, and most enduring in our natures, I am as much a man as you are.” The sun of truth looms high above the far horizon in our day, and even the plains of human thought and purpose are glowing with the light of this new inspiration. “Personal value,” “personal development,” these will be the noontide watchwords, “when the race out of childhood has grown.” Only yesterday I heard a fashionable butterfly, in the surroundings of a luxurious home, saying with sudden enthusiasm: “Of one thing I am sure; every woman that lives is bound to find out what is the very best thing she can do with her powers, and then she’s bound to do it.” In creating each of us with some peculiar talent, God has given us each “a call” to some peculiar work. Indeed, the time is almost here when the only call that will be recognized as valid, in any field, must involve in him who thinks he hears it, both adaptation and success. Each one of us is a marvelous bundle of aptitudes and of capacities. But, just as I prefer the active to the passive voice, I prefer to put the aptitudes first in my present inventory. Besides, the world has harangued us women on our capacities, from the beginning, and it is really refreshing to take the dilemma of our destiny by the other horn, at last!