certainly true that they have produced from amongst themselves a long line of women whose services to the State have proved invaluable.
The public activities of women during the last century and a half, may, for the purposes of a brief summary, be classified in the following manner. First come the women who have accomplished their deeds through personal influence upon the authorities, and who, through their own initiative, have contrived to have some glaring evil removed by those in power. To this class belong Mrs Elizabeth Fry and Miss Florence Nightingale. In the days of these two women, notably of Elizabeth Fry, Parliament was not elected by a popular vote. In 1793, when the little Quakeress was thirteen years of age, 160 persons returned 306 members, an absolute majority, to the House of Commons. She was fifty-two when, by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, the middle-class element in the country received its enfranchisement, and she had been dead twenty-one years when the first real measure of working-class enfranchisement was passed in 1867. In this same year, 1867, Florence Nightingale attained her forty-seventh year and had already accomplished her mighty work for the nation. Partly because politicians were not dependent upon large numbers of votes for their election, and
