iconoclasts they are mere echoes. This affirmative condition is most
favorable to true development. Nothing good has ever come of mere
negation. But we must look for our truths and our basis of true
growth, in the light of the rising dawn--not, as heretofore, in the
waning glory of the setting sun. The union of clubs is the natural
outgrowth, of the planting of the true club idea. It was a little
seed, but it contained the germ of a mighty growth in the kinship of
all women--the women who differ as well as the women who agree; and
the federation of clubs is the forerunner of that unity of the race of
which philosophers have spoken, of which poets have dreamed, but which
only the constructive motherhood and womanhood of the race can
accomplish.




The Clubwoman[1]


The nineteenth century has been remarkable in many ways. It has
developed a new material and social order; but the fact is not as yet
fully recognized that it has developed a new woman--the woman who
works with, other women; the woman in clubs, in societies; the woman
who helps to form a body of women; who finds fellowship with her own
sex, outside of the church, outside of any ism, or hobby, but simply
on the ground of kinship and humanity.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]

It is not yet twenty-one years since a great daily in New York said