America has been richly blessed in its women, as wel. As its men, of patriotism, intelligence, usefulness, and moral worth. Indeed, it has been a marvel to many in the Old World, that the women of the New have been in many instances so thoroughly cultured, so admirably developed morally and intellectually, amid so much that was new and therefore crude in society, and in a freedom which the women of European nations have never enjoyed, and of which those of Asiatic peoples never dreamed. A cultured Christian woman of English birth and education, but now in a lovely Scottish home, wrote to the writer of this volume, that, when visiting America, that which she most enjoyed was the sense of freedom, — a freedom which has been the high privilege of the women of our first century, and will be yet more the glorious heritage of the women of the second, as the ripened fruit is garnered from the promise-blossom. It seemed to me, wrote the lady above mentioned, that by that freedom I was lifted up to a larger and diviner life, and a tender and reverent expectation of glorious possibili ties for our race, and especially for women. And this record of the noble and useful lives of many women in our broad land during the century of American independence.
