USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Congress of Women : held in the Woman's building, World's Columbian exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893 : with portraits, biographies and addresses > Part 109
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99 | Part 100 | Part 101 | Part 102 | Part 103 | Part 104 | Part 105 | Part 106 | Part 107 | Part 108 | Part 109 | Part 110 | Part 111 | Part 112 | Part 113 | Part 114 | Part 115
The third measure of relative success may be taken in the public honors enjoyed by the two classes. The impartial application of this measure nearly establishes an equilibrium between the two classes; and as the young man fevered by ambition applies it, he may feel the balance tip in favor of the practical class, especially as he sees representatives of this class in increasing numbers pushed into high public offices and into the social prominence incident to exalted official station. But even in the world of politics, of all worlds that most casily conquered by the practical mian, that world which offers an exceptional field for the exercise of practical qualities, that world whose atmosphere lends a peculiar glamor both to practical talent and to its rewards, even in this world, the highest department of service is almost exclusively reserved for men of culture. In the diplomatic department the diplomatic man stands aside for the man of culture; in the records of diplomacy one reads few names of mer- chants, mechanics or inventors, but here with Franklin, the one conspicuous repre- sentative of the practical, and who is equally a representative of culture, in diplomacy are registered the names of Ticknor, Taylor, Prescott, Bancroft, Adams, Motley and Lowell, of men equally at home in the world of letters and in the world of affairs; of men whose culture was the instrument of their success in the practical world, and was the occasion of their official elevation and whose elevation in turn advanced their culture.
.
A fourth measure of success may be found in the degree to which a man has con- tributed to the amelioration of human hardships, to the eradication of human wrongs, to the promotion of intelligence and virtue, and maintenance of institutions and soci- eties for the spread of learning, for the practice of benevolence, and for the promotion of religion. By this measure the success of the cultured as a class is relatively trans- cendent. The churches, the colleges, the universities, even the public schools, which are the sharpeners of the practical wits of the practical class-all of these institutions which hold, perpetuate, increase and measure the civilization of our period are, with some notable exceptions, the products and the movements of men of culture.
775
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Shall fame be counted one of the units of measure by which relative success can be computed ? Whose names does the gilded trumpet proclaim in tones that promise echoes from unborn generations? Crœsus is seldom remembered save when and because associated with Solon. In this respect an exquisite irony seems to wait on practical men; having served the practical all their lives to insure fame, they dedicate the practical results of their lives to the ideal. Having worshiped all their lives at the altar of utility, at their deaths to purge the gold they have won from their goddess, and to secure from it an immortal gilding for their names, they must needs desert her and lay her gifts upon the shrine of culture. Through what agencies are the names of Astor, Girard, Cooper, Cornell and Hopkins kept green in the grateful memories of generations that knew them not? Not through trading stations, commercial agencies, financial systems and mammoth business enterprises, but through the colleges, the universities, the art institute, the library which they respectively founded. Through giving local habitations to culture do these kings of the practical alone secure a name.
This generation, reared in the doctrines of Utility, promises to be conspicuous above all generations by virtue of the voluntary tributes which her most distinguished apostles of the practical pay to culture. Never has the practical been more exalted or more faithfully served than by the adventurous explorers and speculators who have pursued its ends on the Pacific Coast; but Leland G. Stanford entrusts the perpetua- tion of his name not to ranch or mine or mint, or vineyard or gold mine, but to that noble university where his practical successes shall all be transmuted into the Olympic nectar, the Hymethian honey and the fair Minervan loaves, upon which Culture feeds her children; and his compeer, James Lick, builds his millions and his hopes of fame into the stately columned and towered observatory which shall hold his name always above the clouds, and link it with celestial contemplations.
To one who will consult their inner significance, these tributes of the practical to the ideal make touching appeal. In that the name of Aristotle will outlast that of Astor, of Claude Lorraine that of Cooper, of Bacon that of Girard; in that the names of Homer and Dante and Milton will outlive that of Stanford and those of Galileo, Bruno and Herschel will outreach that of Lick, there are two lessons which he who runs may read.
The first is that the humblest lover and devotee of culture has a claim upon im- mortality which can not be won by those who build even the proudest altars in her honor, if they have spent their own lives in worshiping at other shrines.
The second is that there is no quarrel between the practical spirit and culture, but that as God makes the wrath of man to serve him, so culture turns the fruit of prac- tical careers into soil and seed, which shall insure the enlargement of her harvests. Culture has repeated these object lessons so often that practical minds are beginning to see the corollary of them, and are wisely using culture as an instrument in forward- ing their plans for the conquest of the material world.
They are unmistakable evidences that culture is, more and more, commanding from the devotees of the practical that recognition which is her due; that she will never be satisfied with the tribute of temples and altars from the practical world until that world shall carry into its offices and market places the spirit and methods to be learned only at her feet.
COME SOUTH, YOUNG WOMAN. By MRS. MARTHA R. FIELD (CATHERINE COLE).
The invitation which I have today the honor and the pleasure to extend to that most important class of American citizens, the young women, is inspired by the triple forces of selfishness, patriotism and hospitality.
It is selfishness of the most admirable quality to enrich our riches by an access of the pure gold of young American womanhood. It is a patriotism of a high order to labor for the proud progress of one's own state, and it is hospitality of the old-time, un- quenchable, Southern sort to open our doors, our arms and our hearts and give with that largest benefi- cence of all, not only the best we have, but all we have.
These are the sentiments, and this the spirit in which, with a great state behind me to corroborate my words, I give the invitation: "Come South, young woman."
In directing an immigration address to young women, rather than to young men, I am conscious that I am inverting the old order of things, but speak- ing to women in a woman's building that is filled with woman's work- much of it of a character to still hap- pily demonstrate the fact that women, like pigeons, have not yet lost their homing virtues-I could hardly MRS. MARTHA R. FIELD). address any other than my sex. Also, I believe that wherever brave, bonnie, winsome young women are, there also the strong, sturdy, desirable young man will be.
Some one tells a story, by the way, to the effect that once on a time all the men were put on one island and all the women onanother, and that an ocean rolled between, and that all the women got drowned. I do not believe it, but I do believe that the future of Louisiana is assured if the young women of the North, East and West take us at our word and come South. From the earliest records of our country, the extreme South has managed, somehow, to be always in evidence. It has contributed to litera- ture some of its most picturesque and dramatic pages; to history some of its most heroic deeds, and to the civilization of the New World it has given the most gorgeous and splendid illustrations of effete and luxurious living.
Today life is casier in the South than elsewhere in the United States. The far- sighted observer watching the direction of capital, the gradual opening up of the inex- haustible resources of the New South, is already certain that the Southern States are inevitably circling back to an indestructible prosperity that is to be based this time on the substantial and entirely commendable foundation of material resources that are being practically developed, without the work of any "slave-driver's whip" or the fear of any intervening disruption.
Mrs. Martha R. Field (Catherine Cole) is a native of Lexington, Mo. She was educated in New Orleans at the Macé Lefranc Institute. She has traveled all over Europe, America and Mexico. She married Charles W. Field, a prominent stock broker of San Francisco. Her special work has been in the interest of literature, decidedly eclectic and especially in the interest of Louisiana. Her profession is that of a journalist, and she is the best known newspaper woman in the South. During the Chicago Fair she wrote daily letters from there to the Picayune, which were declared by the New York press to be the finest accounts of the Fair published. In religions faith she is an Episcopalian : member of the Trinity Church in New Orleans. Her postoffice address is New Orleans, La., care of Picayune office.
776
777
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Less than a year ago it was my good fortune to make the entire tour of the big, beautiful, and infinitely varied State of Louisiana. Less sensational than a journey into darkest Africa or a race over the globe, it was a long story of unique experiences.
With only a small colored lad to drive my wiry little Creole ponies, and a compass and map for a guide, I visited each one of our thirty-nine parishes. Traveling in a buggy, or often in a canoe, or even on that mercurial craft whose equanimity is as susceptible as that of a spirit level-I mean, a pirogue-the journey covered nearly eighteen hundred miles. It extended from the fated Island of the Cheniere Caminada, wrapped in its scarf of sand, to the high red hills of Caddo parish, touching shoulders with Arkansas; from the cypress swamp of the east boundaries to the salt licks and long levels of prairie that margin the shores of the Texan Sabine.
Sometimes, through the pine forests, it meant thirty miles from house to house; sometimes it meant a pallet on the floor, sweet potatoes, and bacon; sometimes it meant a bed a prince of the blood royal had slept in and frapped champagne. But whatever the material environment, on every hearth there burned the torch of hospitality that, come good fortune or ill; never goes out while the home walls hold together.
Once our buggy broke down in a dismal swamp, and I had to walk out of it nine miles. Once we were taken for patent medicine show people. But wherever I went I only gathered more facts to prove that Louisiana is the best poor man's country, and that on its lands and under its sky no one need feel the biting teeth of hunger, the quick of poverty, or know the lack of home comforts.
Louisiana is vaguely but popularly supposed to be composed of swamps, Spanish moss, and alligators-three things that, by the way, have an appreciable market value. My colored friends assure me that a nice boiled alligator's tail is very good eating; in fact, I know that it is a sort of mock pork, and the amphibian's skin is reserved only for the use of the rich. Spanish moss, that hangs our great cave-like forests with its airy stalactites, is worth from three to seven cents a pound, and time and time again have I seen a colored woman snatch up a large bundle of it from her fence and rush off to the little cross-roads store to exchange it there for green coffee or gin. Perhaps all of you have stood in the superb vestibule of the Forestry Building, with its amber walls inlaid with. onyx-colored panels of " curly " cypress. It is a hall fit for a king. Less than eighteen months ago all of it was the heart of a moss-hung Louisiana swamp.
These beautiful woods-the world's future strong ships, casks for its most precious wines, cabinets for its loveliest gems, homes for its richest people-these, lying undis- turbed in forest primeval, these are the unquarried Canovas, and quite as precious, of Louisiana.
That beautiful vestibule is the enterprise of a Northern firm, who are thriftily buying up timber lands all over the South, knowing it is inevitably the site of the future fac- tory and the future mill.
So you see, if we do have swamps, Spanish moss and alligators, they yield us money as readily as Aladdin's lamp gave him gold. If one should try to paint the pict- ure of Louisiana it would be as difficult a task as trying to write the great American novel. Too many conditions and phases of life are American to be compressed into the limits of one story! Too many geographical features belong to the great Southern state to be artistically placed on one canvas.
High hills, rocks and marbles, gushing waterfalls, mineral springs, rolling uplands, clover pastures, boundless prairies, traveled by wild ponies, pine forests like great green cathedrals, cypress swamps all hung with weeping moss, salt sea marshes, long sand dunes, sluggish bayous, brooks like crystal-all these are Louisiana. The alligator and the turtle, the mocking-bird and the linnet, the pompano and the brook- trout, the quail and the papabotte, the deer and the bear-all these are Louisiana.
The squalor of the cabin, the comfort of the prosperous home, the splendor of the old historic mansion-all these are Louisiana. We have almost the oldest towns in the Union, and millions of acres that no spade has ever touched. We have a culture incomparable, and an ignorance almost incomparable, but between these two is a
.
778
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
great, hearty, wholesome, humanity that knows more of the sweet side of life than the bitter, as little of want as Marie Antoinette knew of the price of bread, and lives like a king with a sugar cane for a scepter, a cotton boll for a royal standard, who tickle the soil with a plow and it laughs into a golden harvest for them.
About the lonely waters of the Gulf of Mexico sand lands dribble off through rushes to the sea. These island lands are the homes of gulls, terns, and those beauti- ful white-plumaged pelicans we call the white aigrettes, and which are hunted for that single dainty feather that floats like a thistle down on many a lady's best bonnet. It takes sixteen thousand aigrettes to make a pound, and a pound fetches seven hundred dollars. The deer hide in the salty sedges, and through the soilless wastes the bayous trickle like sprawling watery fingers, reaching out from the land to clutch the sea.
On these low coasts and islands are orange groves and cauliflower farms, and here the fisher folk dwell, their only vehicle a little, red latteen-sailed lugger, their only law the good priest whose teachings keep them from evil just as the gulf waters keep them "far from the madding crowd." Westward the coast gets firmer, and the live oak trees lean with the bend of the wind. The orange trees are taller. In Cameron Parish, not twenty miles from the gulf, there is a grand old tree that many times has borne in one crop ten thousand oranges. I have seen it so, and it is a sight to put all the golden apples of Hesperides to the blush.
Beyond the lowlands of the coast we come into a stretch of magnificent prairie, boundless and golden as Nebraska, that unfurls like a scroll waiting to be written on in all the paying hieroglyphics of the plow and harrow.
Almost all the northern and western people who have come into the state have settled on this western prairie or in the priceless pine forests that clasp it like a girdle. It is a great rice country. Every fruit known to the Middle and Southern states flourishes here and vegetables grow to an almost unequaled perfection. From ten to twenty dollars an acre is the selling price of these lands. Cattle on these prairies do not need to be housed at all during the year, and require not more than six weeks' feeding, even for milk cows.
To the East, the rolling lands begin to take on hardwood trees; the streams that we call "bayous" braid in and out like silver threads through a sober fabric; the ombs of red-tiled roofs and the admonishing crosses of the village churches paint their serene pictures on the bending sky. The fallow fields swell as if breathing, and here we are in the heart of the "Attakapas country," the land of "Evangeline" and the home of the Arcadians.
It is all as pastoral as England. The green banks of the Teche slope like gardens along the Thames; the light mosses on the oaks float the gray crape of their veils so that their most delicate tendrils are etched against the air; the Creole cattle stand knee-deep in the clover or in the bayou shallows cropping lily pods. Beyond the banks you catch the broad green flicker of the cane ribbons. The contented negro croons over his hoe; a plantation bell rings off the workmen for the noonday rest; a wagon creaks by, frothing over with fresh cotton; a mocking-bird sings on a Cherokee hedge; a pelican rests on the queer pontoon bridge that clasps shore to shore. This is Louisiana.
In the northern parishes, where cotton is an ungrateful king, are steep hills, a great untouched marble quarry bursting its bondage to earth, and the long country roads are lined with walnut and persimmon trees and are thick-set with hazel bushes. Here in the orchards apples, peaches, pears and plums pelt their fruits down into the tangled grasses.
In very truth only a minor portion of the state is composed of swamp land or salt water marsh; only a small portion is in danger of overflow; and in the best alluvial districts the black soil will be thirty feet deep. There are farms in Louisiana that have been in cultivation for fifty years, have never had a pound of fertilizer used on them, and yet show no signs of giving out. These lands are sold at from twenty to fifty dollars an acre, according to the improvements.
779
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
I should like to say a word about the tenant or share system. Any large planter will rent a man, black or white, a farm of, say, forty acres. On it will be a house, a mule, a plow, harness and garden tools. It includes the right to free fuel. The rent is half the man's crop. That is, if he makes four bales of cotton, two go to the planter. This liberal system exists, I believe, nowhere else in the world. It offers to every immigrant a chance for a home and a fortune.
A great many good things are free in Louisiana. In one of the pine land parishes there is a great salt well. If one touches a match to this water it flames up over all its surface and burns for several seconds. The neighboring farmers collect annually at this well, boil huge kettles of the water, and by this entirely simple, primitive and picturesque process get salt enough to savor life.
Louisiana is waiting to be cut up into small holdings, just as it is waiting with all its fallow fields for the young owners and the new, brave, blood that is to come to it from all parts of the country. These Corydons and Phyllises will grow crops for the central factory; they will have market gardens, orchards, dairy farms and poultry yards. They will grow flowers and make honey.
Splendid, indeed, are the stories of what young women have done in Louisiana. It is a record of bravery worthy of a state that allows a woman to be captain of a steam- boat-Captain Mary Miller; of a state that builds a great monument to the memory of a woman who never had on a kid glove in all her life, who could not write her own name, who was only great in her goodness. I mean Margaret Haughery, the baker woman, whose loaves built asylums and yet feed thousands of hungry ones.
A few years ago a family owning prairie land in Cameron Parish built themselves a home on it. The nearest neighbor was fifteen miles, the nearest tree four miles. In February they took possession and in July of that year I visited them. The cottage was canopied with roses, and phlox and zennias, carnations and geraniums splashed all the garden walks with bloom. In the kitchen garden where six months since had been only wild hay, corn, tomatoes, ochra, potatoes, egg plants, peas, beans, pump- kins, beets, lettuce and melons grew, equal to the best I have seen at this fair. Two young girls had made that garden, and their sweet faces it was, I reckon, that coaxed from Mother Earth this tribute of all her graces.
Not far from Jennings is a little estate of one hundred and sixty acres, a cottage of three rooms, a few fruit trees, good fences, and all about waving fields of that most beautiful crop, rice. This is the rice farm of a girl squatter, a young Iowa woman, who, with her sixteen-year-old brother came South, took up one hundred and sixty acres of government land, and whose first rice crop paid her $1,200. Her nearest neighbor is another girl farmer who got her land the same way, and who is growing an orchard that already yields her a comfortable living.
Here in Chicago there lives a young dressmaker who saved up enough money to buy twenty acres of land in Louisiana and to start a poultry farm on a small scale. She sent her mother and brother to run the farm, and so successful have they been that this year she is to resign from " seam and gusset and band," and go south to its pine-scented hills, its flower-set hedges, its glorious, generous climate, where, raising her strawberries and early peas for Chicago millionaires, she shall meantime live like a little autocrat on her own principality. All along the line of the Illinois Central road, when it reaches Mississippi and Louisiana, are fruit and vegetable farms man- aged by women, most of them new comers. A young lady told me how she was one day packing her berries for the Chicago market when she ran out of clover. "I just went to an old mint bed under the parlor window and cut mint and covered my boxes with that," said she. "To my surprise my Chicago merchant sent me back a dollar for the mint. During the rest of the year I shipped him fifteen dollars' worth of mint and ten dollars' worth of camelias."
On an old plantation just below New Orleans there lives a woman who had this house but no money. She could not eat, wear or read her queer old gabled home, but she sold her camelias and has been twice to Europe on the profits. Theseare grand
780
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
bushes, and I can not describe their alabaster beauty when each one has on it a thou- sand stainless blooms.
On a cotton plantation in the Red River country, in Grant Parish, lives an eight- cen-year-old girl who is her father's engineer. She runs the cotton gin and gins every year about eighteen hundred bales. She handles that snorting machine as if it were a baby, oils it, feeds it, feels over it, scolds it, tidies it up, and when it is working as good as gold she sits beside it- dear, dainty and only eighteen-crocheting lace for her petticoats. Dead forever, in the face of these shining facts, is the old reproach, "as helpless as a woman!" In every parish are women farmers, stock raisers and planters, and a typical Louisiana woman planter, honorably representing the gra- cious womanhood of her state on your Board of Lady Managers, is our Miss Katherine 1 .. Minor. All professions are open to woman. She is legally eligible for any office. I wear today on my breast a medal given me by the working women of New Orleans; the givers represented twenty different trades and professions; and that is not bad for the South, whose women Lincoln emancipated when he did the slaves.
Women are a power in the South of fearful force when they organize. It was the women of Louisiana who killed the Louisiana State Lottery. When the Women's Anti-Lottery League was formed, the lottery leaders practically admitted they had got their Waterloo.
I have said that life is easy. Perhaps it is too easy to be quite good for us. One day I called a colored man out of the street to help us move some furniture. He was, as he expressed it, " settin' on the wheel of time," and "letting it roll over with him." I offered him a quarter for the job. He rummaged in his pockets and finally bawled back at me: " I reckon I ain't gwine to missy; l'se got fifteen cents."
Our climate is genial. We do not need heavy clothes or big fires. In the coun- try, and in nearly all the small villages and towns, fuel costs only for the hauling. Diphtheria, typhoid fever and small-pox are never dangerously prevalent. Yellow fever has been quarantined out of the state successfully for fifteen years. It will never devastate us aagain. House rents are cheap, schools are good, and it is indeed God's country for little children.
And this brings me to say a word on the relations between the blacks and the white people. What a child-like, lovable, improvident, aggravating, dependent crea- ture the negro is on his native heath only those who are born and brought up amongst them know. It is to the older ones we must turn for all those beautiful and humor- ous traits that grace the exquisite and tender stories of Thomas Nelson Page, Richard Malcolm Johnson and Joel Chandler Harris. What a pride of family have these fine old mammies and sable men-servants who toted their masters and mistresses when all were children together. In my own family is an eccentric old fellow who owns us all and rules us with a rod of iron. His name is " Mr. Montague." Often on those red let- ter Sundays when we are to have ice cream for dinner, he will go to the street corner and call back to know if it is time to come and freeze the cream. I mildly scolded him for this. "Well," said he, "when we is going to have ice cream we might as well let the neighbors know about it."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.