"The Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Tasmania sends hearty greetings and trusts that the International Suffrage Conference may be successful and that it will bring nearer that day when man and woman shall sit 'side by side, full summed in all their powers,'" was the message signed by Jessie S. Rooke, its president, which was given by Miss Anna Gordon, president of the W. C. T. U. of the United States. The response to the addresses of welcome was made by Madame Sofja Levovna Friedland of Russia, who said in beautiful English: I am a loyal daughter of a friendly country, who thanks you for your welcome and brings greetings from her distant home. Russia and the United States have been friends for many a year and are friends today, proven friends, who have stood by each other in the hour of need. In 1863 the French ambassador at the court of St. Petersburg laid before the Czar the proposition of Napoleon III, to interfere in your civil war for the purpose of perpetuating the division between the North and the South. After listening to this bold proposal of the French Emperor, Czar Alexander, the man who had freed twenty-five million slaves in one stroke of his pen, replied: "Tell your Emperor that the United States is our friend and tell him also that it has the same right to maintain a republican form of government as we have to choose a monarchy. Tell him also that he must keep his hands off and not meddle in its affairs for I will not allow anyone to interfere on the other side of the Atlantic. He who strikes my friend, strikes me." This answer in diplomatic language went the same day to Paris and soon after Russian battleships arrived in the harbors of New York and San Francisco. There are still men and women who remember them. They used to wonder why the Russian men-of-war were lying peacefully in American waters. President Lincoln could have given the answer, for in a private message from the Czar he had been assured of the friendship of the great Eastern Empire. He knew that the commanders of the Russian ships had secret orders to act in case of necessity. But the American people have done more, for there came a morning when the glorious winter sun of Russia greeted the Star-Spangled Banner, when American ships landed on Russian shores ready to protect us from a more cruel enemy--hunger. The cry of distress from our famine-stricken villages had found an echo in American hearts and the ships which came did not bear government orders, they bore the tokens of love from one brother to another; they brought us wheat and corn to feed our people.