The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1897-04-06

@A$ A
niversary Exercises at Wake Forest
College.
From Wake Forest Student
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-When my
friend, in announcing my subject,
mentioned the name crusade, your
minds, of course, instantly reverted to
what are known in history Rs the cru
sades. Those magnificent movements
of conscientious men against the inf
del Turk originated, and therefore have
a prior claim upon, the name crusade.
But in nine hundred years intervening
since that time, the name has been
given to many a move, and sometimes,
alas has been debased. A worldwide
movement for political liberty was a
crusade; so was the movement for the
publication Of one city of New York,
led by ''our Tom, " Of course, and, Incl
dentally, DR.. Parkhurstl The buster
in behalf Of the imaginary right of
woman to be no better than man, and
to paddle with him in the mud puddle
of politics, was called a crusade; while
the heaven, born movement against hui
man slavery received but the same
NAME. Of the many movements that
have been thus called, some have ended
badly, others have had noble results.
The accomplishments range all of the
way from the realization of human
liberty down, dO1Cn to the creation of
the new woman"-that thing that be
longs neither to the heavens above mol
to the earth beneath,-remainder, wa
ters under the earth; that is, of neither
the masculine, the feminine, nor yet
the neuter gender-having neither the
gentleness Of q woman nor the manli
ness of a man, and being utterly devoid
of the passivity of a neuter; that is
nevertheless so (pardon the word and
let me use it, devilish worldly wise
that, knowing the advantage which a
good name gives, it has seized upon
and appropriated to it's besmirched self
that name which, when not thus defiled,
betokens what is purest and noblest
in Gods creation-the name woman.
i OO44ON ~ "6S AOEh4hu Al4COlu
who once said that God must love the
common people; that he was sure that
God loved the common people, because
He made so many Of them. Now I am
not sure that it was Lincoln who said
that, but it doesn't matter as to that
fact now. The logic Of the statement
is nvincible, and so to night I am going
to speak to you of those great common
people whom God loves.
Those of us who are young men now
have to face the coming of a mighty
crisis. We shall have to live the lives
of men amid conditions to which our
fathers were never subjected. And I
might add that those who are young
women nov will have to take a very
vital part in this same crisis. The time
is % upon us when women, if they
fill the sphere which their Creator has
ordained they should, even though they
be of the blessed type of home women,
must know something at least of the
political, the social, and the economic
conditions which surround them.
North Carolina has not produced, and
will not produce, a Belvy Lockwood, or
a Mrs. Leasc-and I am glad of it; but
the time has ever been, and now is,
when her women dared do all that doth
become their kind, when they were con
tent with no smaller sphere because
they recognize that there is no greater,
nobler one-than that of being helps
meet for men in their struggle for the
right. At every period of her history
all Of the way from the time of those
noble women of Edenton who pledged
themselves to drink no more of Eng
lands tea, whose buying made their
husbands slaves, down to the times of
the heroines of the Revolutionary and
Civil Wars, who, even though they
stayed by the fresides (where, alas
there was so often no fire to burn), suf-
fered yet far more at the homesteads
than did the men upon the fields of
gore-North Carolina has ever had
daughters in her quiet homes who were
ready and able to hold up the hands of
her sons in every noble work. And this,
by the way, is the eason she has given
more men to die the noble soldiers
death than any other State in the
Union. The question now is, How will
her women respond to day
Strange forces r at work around us.
Ours is a period of intense unrest-per
haps the unrest of coming dawn, but
certainly the unrest of an immediate
storm. What is there beneath it all 2
There is the great movements of the mass