Money is the only kind of wealth that is not common, that is not given
freely; and for that reason it has a deadening and demoralizing effect
upon the minds of those who cultivate and increase it for its own
sake, or fail to put it to its larger and more human uses. Wise
distribution is the only way in which money can be made valuable in
the world: it is only as a developing power, as an aid to the worker,
and a creator of instrumentalities by which good objects can be
accomplished, that it is desirable. In the light of this view, what
place do those men and women occupy who shut themselves up with their
money, and shut out the wide human interests which educate the mind
and heart to noble issues? Going to church does not help them, for it
must be an exclusive church and an exclusive pew, under an exclusive
pastor who patronizes Jesus Christ but does not sympathize with Him,
and who talks about the "dregs of society" as if it were something
far removed from the knowledge and consciousness of his hearers.

The woman of the past has especially been cramped up, bound around,
and blindfolded by her special form of belief, by her tradition, by
her social customs, by her education, by her whole environment; and
the effect will remain stamped more or less upon her individuality
long after the predisposing causes have passed away and better
influences and circumstances have taken their place.

But the present is full of encouragement. The new life has begun: the
woman is here;--not the martyred woman of the past; not the
self-absorbed woman of the present, but the awakened woman of the
future. That woman whose faculties have been cultivated, whose gifts
have been trained, whose mind has been enlarged, whose heartbeats
respond to the touch of the unseen human, and whose quickened insight