Nationalism proposes to call this injustice to a halt. With Herbert Spencer it says, that “One [woman] will not be suffered to enjoy without working that which another produces without enjoying.” It preaches the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of women; the creed heroic in its grandeur of the abolition of alms-giving Charity, and the substitution for this outgrown goddess of past ages a divine spirit of Justice, whose fiat is to be obeyed though the heavens fall. “The growth within the mass of the population of these principles is,” says a recent writer in the _Forum_, “one of the most formidable symptoms of the ‘times.’” In this remark there lies all the pungency of truth. Earnest men and women are preaching the doctrines of Nationalism with all that intensity of faith which characterized the disciples of the anti-chattel slavery movement. To most, its tenets have become a religious as well as a political belief. To hasten the time of its adoption, women’s voices are being heard in lecture halls and wayside inns, in meeting-houses, in the school-room, at the hearth-stone, and through the medium of the printing-press—speaking with the same enthusiasm for the redemption of the white slave as the Lucy Stones and Harriet Beecher Stowes did before 1866 for the enfranchisement of the black slave. That woman’s duty to woman is taking this noble shape of pleading the cause of humanity, as though every industrial worker in factory, field, mill, and shop were her own mother, children, sisters, brothers, is the light in the heavens showing that the darkest hour before dawn has been reached, and is passing away from the horizon of the industrial population. XII. CHARITY. BY JOSEPHINE SHAW LOWELL. To make even a superficial study of the work done and being done by American women to help their suffering fellow-beings must fill the heart with gratitude for the wisdom and devotion displayed, and with a rejoicing hope for the future. To know that all over this vast continent, intelligent and unwearying women are thinking and working and praying for the needy, the wicked, the ignorant, the weak, and the down-trodden, is a joy and an inspiration.