erect village halls and to have libraries of books, the windows
through which the life and wonder and power of humanity can be seen.
Some of you have light-heartedly, in the growing sympathy of unity,
revived the dances and songs and sports which are the right
relaxation of labor. Some Irishwomen here and there have heard
beyond the four walls in which so much of their lives are spent
the music of a new day, and have started out to help and inspire
the men and be good comrades to them; and calling themselves
United Irish-women, they have joined, as men have joined, to help
their sisters who are in economic servitude, or who suffer from
the ignorance and indifference to their special needs in life which
pervade the administration of local government. We cannot build
up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women.
It will help life little if we have methods of the twentieth
century in the fields, and those of the fifth century in the home.
A great writer said: "Woman is the last thing man will civilize."
If a woman had written on that subject she would have said: "Woman
is the last thing a man thinks about when he is building up his
empires." It is true that the consciousness of woman has been
always centered too close to the dark and obscure roots of the
Tree of Life, while men have branched out more to the sun an wind,
and today the starved soul of womanhood is crying out over the
world for an intellectual life and for more chance of earning a
living. If Ireland will not listen to this cry, its daughters will
go on slipping silently away to other countries, as they have been
doing--all the best of them, all the bravest, all those most mentally
alive, all those who would have made the best wives and the best
mothers--and they will leave at home the timid, the stupid and the
dull to help in the deterioration of the race and to breed sons as
sluggish as themselves. In the New World women have taken an