1930 - Annual Convention Report

              00 A L B E R T A W O M E N ' S I N S T I T U T ES
your faith is strongest. Then your later years will still be marked by pro­ductive
work, by productive leisure. The Women's Institute offers such an
outlet for our maturer age, and implies no weakening of church or spiritual
life. A reflected happiness will radiate around, you will be freed from the
hurry and turmoil that accompany the chasing after every new society, and
by specialization the years that remain will have something tangible to show
for the hours that might otherwise have been written off as lost. This is
sound advice, and might be more forcible but for the consciousness that it is
hard to practise one's own preaching. In this great west especially we all
get rolled up in offices, and the day inevitably comes when from poor health
or boredom or sheer exhaustion the wriggling out has to be done. Be a
miser then in g i v i n g away your leisure. It is all that you can call your own
in life, and one day you will stand face to face with yourself and ask: " Has
my leisure counted for anything at a l i i ' " Of course it is counting, and count­ing
wherever you pass.
Just in closing I should like to make a reference to the unconscious influ­ences
in the world, Many of you have had strange experiences of the power
of your own influence, when you were all unaware of exerting any. Letters
come like bolts from the blue; you travel in a train, and perhaps help some
lame woman to get about, and later you find that you have cast your bread
upon the waters, and it has come back in an expression of faith in humanity.
In our Women's Institutes this is no rare experience. I once got a share of
a sleeping berth on a crowded train, because the woman there had heard me
at an Institute meeting in Toronto. There are letters in my desk that cannot
be explained, and yet the writer had some reason for turning to me. Not
anyone can afford to minimize the value of this for it is one of the mysteries
of life. It resembles the way your children interpret your own mother, their
grandmother, whom they have never known. They still feel her influence.
What a power is this in our Institutes! How wide when we send it into the
world with the name of Women's Institutes that was first our very own in
Canada. Do you not feel that we are sisters in a vast, yet familiar home,
each one bringing her quota of personality, and infusing it into the hearts of
others. Our Federation should be like the spirit of the Dawn W i n d:
" At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen.
You will hear the feet of the W i n d that is going to call the Sun.
A n d the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
A n d though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
" So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of the long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And every one smiles at his neighbour, and tells him his soul is his own."
— K i p l i n g .
The wonderful new cathedral at Liverpool, England, has a women's
window in glorious stained glass, which celebrates, not shadowy saints, but
the women saints of modern times, women who had no thought of having
their memory thus perpetuated. " To Elizabeth F r y and all P i t i f u l Women,"
" To Christina Rossetti and all sweet singers," " To Grace D a r l i n g and all
courageous maidens," " To Susanna Wesley and all devoted mothers." " To
Louisa Stewart, a missionary to China, who gave her life for her faith," " To
Queen V i c t o r i a , " " To K i t t y Wilkinson, a washerwoman who in a time of
cholera washed the bed clothing of her stricken neighbours," " To Mary
Rogers, a ship's stewardess who put her lifebelt on another, when the vessel
was sinking." Thus the window commemorates the poor helpers of the poor,
those numberless women who have lived and died for others. Who would
deny the reach of unconscious influence? Again I would call the unnumbered