But women did not plan a club for amusement, as men have usually done: they planned it for mental improvement. It was not without a prophecy of the coming time that the characters of our grandmothers were trained in so severe a school. They were the reverse of pleasure-loving, and took even their diversions seriously. The central point of their lives was an inexorable sense of duty. Its twin trait was energy. With a radical change of ideals their daughters did not lose these traits. A religious devotion to one set of aims was simply transferred to another. The road to their new Utopia was knowledge. All things would come in its train--culture, independence, happiness, the power to help a suffering world. It was this leaven of Puritan traditions which gave the club an element that was not found in the salon. The American woman may lack a little of that elusive quality, half sensibility, half wit, which makes so much of the Frenchwoman’s charm; she may lack, too, her perfection of tact, her inborn genius for form and measure: but she has what the Frenchwoman has not--something that belongs to a race in which the ethical overshadows the artistic. It is devotion to principles rather than to persons, to essentials rather than to forms. Her pursuit of knowledge may often be superficial, from the immensity of the field she lays out for herself; but her aims are serious, and lead her toward moral and sociological questions, rather than matters of sentiment and taste. The woman’s club is not a school of manners, and concerns itself little with the fine art of living. It claims to instruct, not to amuse--or, rather, it seeks amusement in that way; and it is more interested in doing things than in the modes of doing them. It does not rely upon diplomacy to gain its ends, but upon the wisdom and justice of the ends, appealing to the reason instead of the imagination. It also deals more with masses than with individuals. No doubt, the necessity of going outside the realm of personal feeling in managing public or semi-public affairs helps to give the poise and self-command which go far toward offsetting the intensity of temperament that has always made the discussion of vital questions so perilous in gatherings of women, though we have occasion enough to know that wisdom and sanity do not invariably preside at gatherings of men, even supposably wise ones. The qualities fostered by the club are energy, earnestness, independence, versatility, and--not exactly intellectual conscience, which implies traditional standards, but a sense of intellectual duty that is not quite the same thing. All this is remote from the spirit of the salon, with its social codes and conventions, its graceful amenities, its sparkling wit, its play of sentiment, its diplomatic reserves, and its clear intelligence working through endless private channels toward a new order of things. It points to the club, not as a conservator of