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Evening Star, Issue 13013, 7 January 1907, Page 4

Death has claimed at least three eminent women during tho last few Th* Toll weeks, each of whom had or i»ath. i n ), er <j ay . g eMr ation

done tho State some service—namely, Mrs Priscifla Bright M'Laren, Mrs Josephine Butler, and tho Baroness Bnrdctt-Coutts. Old beyond tho normal limit, blessed with tho affection of thousands of known and iinknwrn friends, tlieso veritable "mothers of Israel" have passed to "where beyond these voices there is peace." Mrs M'Laren was ninetytwo years of ago when in November last, in the City of Edinburgh, she joined tho vast host who were waiting on the other side. To many, perhaps to tho majority, tlie name of Mrs M'Laren will be unknown. Her work.and labors were merged among those of othervS. Yet, as tho sister of that famous Tribune of, tho people, that past master of the lost art of parliamentary j oratory, John Bright, her name was familiar throughout Great Britain. She identified herself with tho great Anti-Corn Law agitation from its first stages to its triumphant close; she advocated fetnalo suffrage in those far-off days when John Stuart Mill brought it forward in tho House of Commons; she lived to send a message of sympathy to tho imprisoned suffragettes, whose ways are so unlike what hers were; and she was the loyal assistant and friend of Elizabeth Fry when that yet-remem-bered and noblo woman came like a gleam of sunshine to the inmates of England's noisome prisons. Her life, from her first years of conscious intelligence—away back in tho England of war and riot and social injustice of tho early decades of the nineteenth century, till tho dawn of the twentieth—was given to tho cause of her less fortunate sisters and the amelioration and abolition of galling and savage disabilities. Of Mrs Josephine Butler tho world knows something more. Her work brought her into tho fierce glare of publicity and the yet crueller glare of satire and ridicule. It was largely due to her untiring efforts, that the CD. Act was swept off tho Imperial Statute Book and that the "age of consent" was raised by the House of Commons. As a ceaseless, able, and talented writer, speaker, and worker for reforms concerned with the relations of the sexes site had fow equals. Neitlier caricature nor jeer nor slander could check her, and she had the consolation of knowing ere paying (at the ripo ago of seventysix) that last debt of Nature which wo must all pay that the bread she had cast upon tho waters had not been wasted nor failed of fruition. Tho Baroness Bur-dett-Coutts was, beyond doubt, tho most widely known of this splendid trio of British women. Her namo in. the Old Country a quarter of a century ago was a household word. With Penbody she represented all that was highest and best, and therefore tlie most practical, in modern philanthropy. Her benevolent actiyities took the form, not of palliatives, but of helps- She wanted to lift the dwell-, era of tile slants into a permanently better environment; she wished to prove to tho degraded of her own sex'thai there was nlwavs a way outward and upward; and educationally slio placed at tho command of merit without wealth tho means to ob. tain the crowning gk>ry of youth's desire. Tho wisdom -Urat characterised the disposal of her gifts was as marked as their bounteous spontaneity. It could hardly be otherwise. Charles Dickens was for many years her friend, advisor, and almoner. So, too, wo think, was tlie Rev. Benjamin Wangh; whilst for the hist twenty-five years her accomplished young husband, Mr Burdott-Cwattß, M.P., has superintended her numerous and' far-reaching gifts and bequests. It is good for a nation to be able to number women such as these among its people. They should form, one of our most precious pcseessionK, and tlwir memories should be cherished by out children's children. Trials, disappointments, l»eart.aches they had in common with the rest of us, for

Who, save -the blest gods, can claim Through life's whole course an unmixed happiness? Had thoy not-suffered they could not have felt; had they not known sorrow they could not havo •understood the tragic pathos of joyless lives. Amid so much that is more trumpeted to tho four winds, und which in tho result is too often but Dead Sea fruit, we ace apt ho forget the army of self-sacrificing, unknown workers that live on in pajticaco from day to day, striving uncomplainingly to make this world a little better than tbey found it But the leaders we may know, and of these there were no finer types than the three we have named, tho last of whom was laid to rest in thai shrine where a, grateful country has caused to be placed the ashes .of. her noblest sans.