The Woman’s Association of Commerce of America was recently organised at Chicago in a convention of business women gathered from cities from New York to Chicago. For the first time adequate training to fit a woman for real commercial responsibilities is beginning to be as freely offered as to men. Cecile Bornozi, widely known as the only railway woman in France, came by her commercial knowledge largely through instinct and inheritance. She gave up literature at the Sorbonne for it, because as the daughter of Philip Bornozi, from Constantinople, who supplied rolling stock to the railways of the Orient, France, and Belgium, the call to commerce was in her blood. But except for the few specially placed women like that, the way up in commerce before the year 1914 was not plain and easy. Now all over the world there are floating in on the morning mail invitations like the one that has just come to me from the New York University. How much it means, I suppose no man can quite understand. Suppose you, sir, were going to attempt to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile and chambray and all the rest of those mystifying terms that tangle the tongue of a novice sent down the aisle of a department store with a sample in his lower left hand vest pocket to be properly matched—you’d feel, wouldn’t you, that a course in this positively unknown tongue would be helpful in making yourself and your errand rightly understood. Just so. Now all unknown language is a handicap as is this one to you, which is quite familiar to every woman, for we learn to lisp in terms of our clothes. But on the other hand, there are commercial terms which you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environment, which are to your sister a foreign tongue. We need the schools to teach it. And I am not sure but it is the schools now being set up by the women who have learned through their own experience that offer the surest interpretation of the way in these new paths in which women’s feet are set to-day.