It is said that the men of the nation are what their mothers make them, as a rule. The home takes its cue and hue from her, and if a woman is, in its best sense, womanly—if she is true, loving, courageous, patient, wise, and tender—she, consciously and unconsciously, organizes and puts in operation a set of influences that do more to mould the destiny of nations than any man, uncrowned, with exceptional powers as a leader and worker, can possibly hope to effect. She it is to whom are given the unwritten tablets—the impressionable minds of little, confiding children. To her it is given to write the first lessons, to awaken the first ideas. She colors them indelibly with her own. If she keeps herself always an ideal to her children, as a wise and loving mother may, her influences follow them, even when they are merged into manhood and womanhood; even when they are swallowed up in the whirlpool of active life, and her teachings are never forgotten; the ideals she has held up before their childish eyes are vested with a sacredness of which nothing can despoil them. The voice with which men speak, in the expression of power, is the voice of the mother who bore them. There is nothing more potent than this. There is no possible way in which women can so surely extend and intensify their influences and power, or make them felt in so great a measure upon the moral and social questions of the day, as by carefully and wisely rearing honorable, close-thinking, broad-minded sons and daughters. This is the highest duty—the greatest distinction conferred upon any one in this world, and woman alone was deemed worthy of the work, when God set her in the home as its queen. For this work, then, she must prepare herself by enlarging every virtue, eliminating every vice. She can not hope to wear the vestments of high priestess over a vicious heart or a besotted mind. She must learn to rise above the “taking of endless thought for the ignoble morrow,” to hold herself above vulgar interests and mean details. She must rise above neighborhood gossip and petty meannesses, and by holding up to her own eyes grander and purer ideals, she will come to see that the life is more than meat, and the body greater than raiment.—The Commoner.