NAWSA SUBJECT FILE Ames, Charles G. At the N. E. Festival in May, 1890, Chas. G. Ames said: "We have with us a man who has won his crown of gray by soldiering in a noble cause; the knight of the woman suffrage movement, sans peur et sans reproche, who is always young for liberty." GENEVA SERIES Of Attractive Booklets : : : Handsome in Form. Popular and Inspiring in Contents. "We especially commend these little books to young men and women for their uplifting influence." - Boston Home Journal. The Happy Life. Minot J. Savage Love Does It All. Ida Lemon Hildyard The House Beautiful. William C. Gannett Culture without College. William C. Gannett The Home. Phoebe M. Butler Beauty of Character. Paul R. Frothingham Serenity. James H. West Accepting Ourselves. Arthur M. Tshudy The Quest of the Holy Grail. Charles F. Bradley Home to the Ideal, Frederic A. Hinckley "Beautiful and helpful. An inspiration to higher thinking and nobler living." - Journal of Education. Paper, choice edition, silk-stitched, white or tinted covers, put up in entitled envelopes, 15 cents each. (Eight to one address for $1.00.) Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by JAMES H. WEST, Publisher, 100 High Street, --- BOSTON, MASS. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? A Consideration of the Meaning and Aims of Life in Journeying through the World BY ABRAM CONKLIN "Live pure, speak truth, right wrong, ... else wherefore born?" - Tennyson. BOSTON JAMES H. WEST, PUBLISHER 100 HIGH STREET What Are You Doing Here? We are gratified to announce the Ninth Volume in the "Life" Series of cloth-bound books. It bears the title above given, and is one of the brightest and most readable of the whole series. Any friend of noble literature who misses the reading of this volume will miss a great deal. What Are You Doing Here? The author of the book is Abram Conklin, and the sparkle and glow of his pages reveal him as a writer well calculated to speedily win popular favor. The work contains eight chapters or sections, and is a consideration of the Meaning and Aims of Life in Journeying through the World. What Are You Doing Here? 1. Life as a Pilgrimage. 2, Beauties of the Way. 3. Dangers of the Way. 4. Companions. 5. Keeping to the Right. 6. Blessing in Disguise. 7. Not this Way again. 8. The End of the Road. These are the general topics treated; and any man or woman-- especially any young man or woman-- having this book and reading it will find eyes and heart opened for the journey of life, in a delightful and far-reaching way. Styles and Prices as per other volumes of the Series. "LIFE" SERIES Of Cloth-bound Books : : : Lowell Times. -- The books are very beautiful, and excellently adapted for simple gifts. their value, however, is in their contents: self-development, helpfulness, unselfishness, great-hearted manliness. The House Beautiful. By William C. Gannett. The ideal home and the "dear 'togetherness.' " Love Does It All. By Ida Lemon Hildyard. A "life" story: "To comfort, to honor, and to keep." "As Natural as Life." By Charles G. Ames. Four life-studies. In Love with Love. By James H. West. Four life-studies. A Child of Nature. By Marion D Shutter. Five life-studies. Power and Use. By John W. Chadwick. Four life-studies. Being and Doing. by William c. Gannett, and others. Five life-studies: Culture without college; Accepting Ourselves; Beauty of Character; Making the Best of It; Winter Fires. Farther On. By Minot J. Savage, and others. Five life-studies: The Seeing Eye; Doing What We Can; The Happy Life; Novel-Reading; The Sight of Nature. What Are You Doing Here? By Abram Conklin. Eight life-studies. Baltimore American.-- There is a tranquil, strengthening, uplifting power in these little books that makes one cherish for them, when they have been enjoyed and laid aside, the warm, grateful sentiment with which we treasure dear friends. Cloth, beveled, neatly stamped, each 50 cents. Special white and gold edition, full gilt, in box, each 75 cents. Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by JAMES H. WEST, Publisher, Boston, Mass. The Memorial of Virtue An address delivered at a memorial service for Mrs. Charles Gordon Ames, at the Church of the Disciples, Unitarian, Boston, Massachusetts, October 3, 1931, by the minister of the church, Rev. Abraham M. Rihbany. Mrs. Ames died at Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, August 21, 1931, in her ninety-first year. The Memorial of Virtue Friends, we are here today to honor the memory of a notable woman, whose passing seems more like the passing of a generation than an individual. During a life which spanned almost a century, Mrs. Ames intelligently and sympathetically related herself to the thoughts and events of a great period; a period of progress and readjustment unexcelled, if equaled, in all history, For America it was an age of expansion in every field of thought and action; the early years of this great nation's maturity. It was a revolutionary time in every sense of the word. Momentous events came on, jostling one another at a high rate of speed. The settling of millions of newcomers; the establishment of vast systems of communication over a whole continent; the advent and permanent acceptance of the universal and higher education of women; the rise and triumph of the liberal 4 Christian movement; the extinction of slavery, after a terrible civil war,-- these and many other notable events practically began their march in this period. Now to those of us who were fortunate enough to know her intimately, Mrs. Ames seemed an epitome of this series of historic occurrences. She lived the life of her time as a receptive and creative thinker. Being endowed with a keen, alert, flexible, spiritual, and constructive mind, she touched life at many and various points. No human interest was foreign to her; nor did she have a limited and narrow view of any. She was an ardent Unitarian, but never a rigid sectarian; she was deeply and actively interested in the education, enfranchisement, and elevation of women, but never in a narrow feminism; she was a stalwart patriot, but never allowed herself to believe that God had limited His favors to her own country and found pleasure in no other people. 5 During my associations with her for twenty years, what always and particularly challenged my attention was the generous flexibility of her mind, both intellectually and socially. It was not, however, the flexibility of indecision and easy emotional concession, but that of well-wrought and finely tempered steel. It was chiefly this quality, I think, which enabled her to escape the debilitating isolation of old age. In a real sense Mrs. Ames never grew old. Her vital, constant, and happy interest in intellectual and social progress kept her abreast of the times. The young people were as much her willing companions as those of her own generation. Her acquaintance with literature, ancient and modern, religious and secular, scientific and romantic, was wide and wisely selective. The so-called "radical" changes in the field of thought never frightened her. She was fortunate enough to realize from her early days that life 6 was a process not at fixity; that the revelations of God and the human mind were not limited to any one time or race; and that ours was to make intelligent transitions with real satisfaction and gratitude. With what ease and certainty she drew upon the treasures of knowledge in private conversation and public address, those of us who heard her on so many occasions very well know. I think that had she chosen such a career, Mrs. Ames would have achieved a national reputation as a public speaker. Her firm grasp of her subject, her dynamic personality, self-reliance, racy diction, and her sense of proportion as a narrator, fully qualified her for the public platform. Her mind was not so much well- stored with facts as populated with living ideas and events. It often seemed to me that she never forgot a significant event that ever came within her experience. In relating a long past 7 event she would, by recalling the circumstances under which it occurred, giving its date and the names of the actors in it, give it the color and warmth of a living, present occurrence. Gravity, pathos, humor, story, and anecdote, characterized her utterances, as the thought and occasion required. But Mrs. Ames's interest in the past, though deep, was not of the slavish kind. To her the value of the past was to be found in its ability to serve the present and to facilitate future progress. She marched with the years; and with wise discrimination allied herself with many constructive movements. Her interest in the present and her hope for a greater future were an inspiration to her associates. On one occasion, when I came to thank her for an address she had just give us embodying these thoughts, she turned to me and said, "What a wonderful age this is. I wish I were born at this time instead of eighty-three years ago." 8 How could I help repeating to her the Gospel saying: "Woman, great is thy faith." Yet while Mrs. Ames did not choose what is known as a public career, her interest in the public welfare was strong, constant, and fruitful. She was very influential in the founding of the Associated Charities in the country, and the Children's Aid Society in conjunction with Dr. Ames and Mrs. Susan Lesley. She was appointed Overseer of the Poor in Philadelphia and was the founder and first president of the first Women's Club, the New Century Club, in that city. When the family removed to Boston, where Dr. Ames was called by this church to succeed Dr. James Freeman Clarke as its minister, Mrs. Ames continued her public services with increased devotion. She was the first woman to be appointed factory inspector in Massachusetts, which office she occupied for four years. She held various offices in 9 the Massachusetts and New England Woman Suffrage Association for Good Government, served two terms on the Boston School Committee, and was one of the first women to serve on the original Board of Trustees of Simmons College. In addition to these and other public benefactions, Mrs. Ames gave herself devotedly to the two sacred institutions, the church and the home. I shall not undertake here to speak of her as a mother. The noble characters, the fine culture, and the public services of her children, amply testify to the sort of home training their parents gave them. Example and precept went hand in hand in that home, and the results could not fail to merit the praise of men and acceptance with God. It is as a Christian woman and a church-woman that I wish to speak of her. Mrs. Ames had a deeply spiritual nature and was a devout worshipper. 10 Reason and emotion were finely balanced in her. Her broad, liberal spirit was that of the careful and progressive student of religion. Her conception of Christianity had a universal outlook. The intellectual limitations of the early Christians and the ages of dogmatic theology were to her natural for their respective periods, but unnatural for the present age. Her reverence for Jesus rested on the validity and beauty of his own experience of God, rather than on what others wrote about him. His luminous consciousness of the divine was to her the way, the truth, and the life. Therefore the possessors of that consciousness in every land and race were to her members of the same communion. That was her quest as a religious woman, and her resource as teacher and guide of thousands during her long life. In addition to this spiritual consciousness, every scientific fact, 11 every constructive philosophy, ever useful mechanical invention, and every other means of human helpfulness, were part of her religion. Her contributions to the Unitarian denomination as a teacher and organizer were many. Chief among them was her initiation of that great organization now known as the General Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women. It was in the year 1880, at a meeting of the Unitarian National Conference, at Saratoga, that, supported by a few others, she suggested the establishment of such an organization, then called The Women's Auxiliary Conference. The suggestion was adopted by the denomination and we all know its great and beneficent results. Her position in her beloved Church of the Disciples, for more than forty years, was that of an able, wise and gracious guide. She and Dr. Ames carried on a dual ministry. They gave 12 their parishioners and the city of Boston what the lapse of the years cannot waste. Their spiritual gifts were many and large, and their years of service of the years of the Most High. In this church, also, Mrs. Ames applied her organizing ability to the women's society with telling effect. She organized our Women's Alliance on a plan, which, to my knowledge, was unprecedented in our denomination. She called upon the women to be their own lecturers at the meetings of their Alliance. She led them into the fields of intellectual and spiritual knowledge with a firm step and sure insight. The response was amazing even to the women themselves. A wealth of talent was revealed among them; and for these many years our Alliance has been a center of intellectual and spiritual education, as well as a social and philanthropic organization. Seldom have our women called 13 an outside speaker to address them at their regular meetings. Mrs. Ames' further purpose here was that the Alliance women should not content themselves with the obvious and commonplace, but penetrate the richer regions of human knowledge. In planning their annual programs, with Mrs. Ames' counsel and advice, which continued to within a few months of her death, our women covered a wide range. They have dealt with such subjects as the great prophets of religion, the Greek tragedians, religion and the arts, religion in the great poets, psychology and philosophy as related to religion, evolution, great preachers of the ages, roads to world peace, and kindred subjects. Their successive programs form a necessarily limited but discriminating record of the march of thought in this swiftly moving age, and a creditable expression of their own talents as thinkers and speakers. Thanks to the 14 impulse they first received from Mrs. Ames, and to their own perseverence, their search for great truths still continues. Nor has this church reserved its expression of gratitude to Mrs. Ames to this solemn occasion; it has been continuous. Here I can only quote from a letter which our congregation sent to her by a special committee on her ninetieth birthday, and which sums up the sentiments of this church. "With deepest affection," says the letter, "we congratulate you on the many rich harvests of culture and good works you have gathered and scattered abroad in these ninety years. We are sincerely grateful that of this rich life you have give forty-one years of service, love, and devotion to us as a church and as individuals; and that you are still with us wearing life's crown bejeweled with personal virtues and the rewards of public service. You have given us what neither time nor 15 circumstance can take away from us. You have successfully personified to us in your esteemed self the power and richness of our liberal Christian faith. You have taught us by word and deed the deeper meaning of the scriptural saying, 'Love never faileth.'" No, my friends, love never faileth. Nor are such virtues as this noble woman personified in herself of the earth, earthy. The dust of time and changed does not lie on them. To such souls death has not sting and the grave no victory. Both reason and faith assert their claim to divine kinship and warrant their immortality. Let us trust that when we shall have risen about our mortal ignorance; when we shall have passed over the chasms of fatalism and crossed the thirsty desert of hopeless doubting, we shall find the claims of right reason and a living faith to be true and right, and that the destiny of the soul is eternal. 16 Fanny Baker Ames, our friend, teacher and guide, has passed on to the Vast Unknown, but not out of our own lives. She lives and shall live in us until our own change shall come. Our faith in her destiny and ours has been expressed in the living words of Dr. Ames who preceded her to the higher realm. Thus speaks that prophet of God: "The ship may sink and I may drink A hasty death in the bitter sea; But all that I leave in the ocean grave Can be slipped and spared, and no loss to me. What care I though falls the sky, And the shrivelling earth to a cinder burn? No fires of doom can ever consume What never was made nor meant to burn. Let go the breath! there is no death To the living soul, nor loss, nor harm. Not of the clod is the life of God: Let it mount, as it will from form to form." SCHOOL - VOTERS' LEAGUE 184 Boylston St., Room 47, Boston EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Mrs. CHARLES G. AMES . . . . PRESIDENT Mrs. MARY MORTON KEHEW. . . 1st VICE-PRESIDENT Mrs. STANLEY McCORMICK. . . TREASURER Mrs. RICHARD Y. FITZGERALD. . . SECRETARY MRS. PERCY G. BOLSTER MISS ALICE A. BURDITT MISS MABEL I. EMERSON MRS. EMMA B. GULLIVER MISS CATHARINE M. MCGINLEY MISS LOUISE H. MURDOCK MISS FANNY G. PATTEN MISS LAURA S. PLUMMER MRS. EVA W. WHITE MISS ANNE WITHINGTON COUNSEL . . . HOWARD W. BROWN TELEPHONE BACK BAY 2344-1 VICE-PRESIDENTS MISS MARY I. ADAMS MRS. GEORGE W. ANDERSON MRS. JOHN L. BATES MRS. ESTHER F. BOLAND MRS. CHARLES M. CABOT REV. FLORENCE K. CROOKER MISS HELENA S. DUDLEY MRS. CHRISTOPHER ELIOT MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS MRS. EMILY A. FIFIELD MISS ADA M. FITTS MRS. HENRY D. FORBES MISS MATILDA A. FRASER MRS. CHARLES T. GALLAGHER MISS ELIZABETH E. HOUGH MISS ISABEL HYAMS MRS. JOHN G. JACK MISS A. GERTRUDE MALLOCK MRS. LUCIA AMES MEAD MRS. MARY KENNEY O'SULLIVAN MISS MARY BOYLE O'REILLY MISS MARY E. PERKINS MRS. WILLIAM J. QUINN MRS. ELLEN H. RICHARDS MISS KATHERINE H. SHUTE MRS. FISKE WARREN MRS. DORA WILLIAMS MRS. FRANK L. YOUNG MRS. WILLIAM S. YOUNGMAN AN URGENT APPEAL Dear Madam: -- The enclosed petition explains itself. The present state of things in Russia must arouse the sorrow and sympathy of every thoughtful person; and the unpunished outrages inflicted on women and children make an especial appeal to the hearts of American women. The Russian government is sensitive to foreign public opinion, and American statesmen assure us that, if Concurrent Resolution No. 28 is brought up and discussed in Congress, whether it passes or not, the publicity given to the matter will probably be the means of saving thousands of human lives in Russia. In view of these facts, I earnestly request to circulate the enclosed petition for signature among the members of your club and among your friends, and to send to it, when signed, to your Representative in Congress. It will be especially helpful if you can secure the writing of any letters to U. S. Senator Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois and U. S. Representative Robert G. Cousins of Iowa, chairmen respectively of the Senate and House Committees on Foreign Relations, asking them to use their influence to have Concurrent Resolution No. 28 brought up and discussed in Congress. The address of Mr. Cullom is U. S. Senate, and that of Mr. Cousins, U. S. House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. This petition has already been signed by Bishop Potter, Lyman Abbott, Mark Twain, Louis D. Brandeis, E. H. Clement, Rev. Charles G. Ames, Bishop Whitaker, Rabbi Charles Fleischer, Justice Samuel Greenbaum, R. Fulton Cutting, Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, Bishop Greer, James B. Reynolds, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Norman Hapgood, Judge Julian W. Mack, Hamilton Holt, A. S. Frissell, Homer Folks, Miss Lillian D. Wald, and many other persons of prominence. The letters and petitions should be sent in as promptly as possible, since Congress is not expected to sit later than May 10. JULIA WARD HOWE 3 Park Street, Boston, Room 16. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.