Thus it was that the demoralising effect of human slavery did, up to the time of the great shock which the nation received in the spring of 1861--a shock which galvanized it into life, and sent the before vitiated blood coursing hotly, and, at last, healthfully through all the veins and arteries of the national body--persistently encroach alike upon Government and society. The slime of that serpent was over everything in the North as well as the South, and if it did not kill out the popular virtue and patriotism as completely here as there, where it is intimately interwoven with the life of the people, the difference is due to that very cause, as well as to the inextinguishable vitality that God has conferred on the genius of human liberty, so that when betrayed, hunted, starved, outlawed, she yet seeks some impregnable fastness, and subsists on manna from the Divine Hand. This, then, is the fourth step in the attainment of the true ideal of character for American women--_the effort to renew society in the actual simplicity of our republican institutions_. Women, American women, should hold dear as anything in life the preservation and purity of those blessed institutions, guaranteeing to them as they do all their eminent privileges, and founded as they are on that emancipating genius of Christianity, which, through every age, has pointed a finger of hope, love, encouragement to woman as a chief instrument in the world's promised elevation and enfranchisement. While dwelling upon the faults of American women, I would at the same time do full credit to their virtues. I believe that they occupy as high a place as any women in the world, even a higher. But I trust that they will rise to the height of the demands which the changed times and the exigencies of the situation are pressing upon them, and will continue to press. This war has clearly and forcibly eliminated truths and principles which the long rule of the slave power had wellnigh eclipsed; it has been a very spear of Ithuriel, at whose keen touch men and principles start up in their real, not their simulated character. During its three years of progress, the national education has been advanced beyond computation. When it is over, things, ideas, will not go back to the old standpoint. Then will arise the new conditions, demands, possibilities. If there is one truth that has been unmistakably developed by the war, it is the controlling moral power and sanction which a free government derives from woman. And this has been shown not only in the influence for good which the loyal women of the North have contributed for the aid of the Government, but with equal power in the influence for evil which the Southern women have exerted for its destruction. I suppose it is true that this war for slavery has received its strongest, fiercest continuing impulses from the women of the South. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm, the persistency, the heroic