The Lincoln County Herald

Home and its Queen.
There is probably not an unpreverted man or woman living who does not feel that the sweetest consolations and the best rewards of life are found in the loves and delights of home. There are few who do not feel themselves indebted to the influences that clustered around their cradles for whatever of good there may be in their characters and conditions.
Home, based upon legitimate marriage, is so evidently an institution of God, that a man must become profane before he can deny it. Wherever it is planted, it stands a bulwark. Wherever it is pure and true to virtuous idea, there lives an institution conservative of all the nobler interests of society.
Of this realm woman is the queen. It takes its cue and hue from her. If she is in the best sense womanly--if she is true and tender, loving and heroic, patient and self-devoted-she consciously or unconsciously organizes and puts in operation a set of influences that do more to mould the destiny of the nation than any man uncrowned, by power or eloquence, can possibly effect. The men of the nation are what their mothers made them, as a rule; and the voice which those men speak in the expression of their power is the voice of the women who bore and bred them.
There can be no substitute for this. There is no other possible way in which the women of the nation can organize their influence and power that will tell so beneficently upon society and the state. Neither woman nor the nation can afford to have home demoralized or in any way deteriorated by the loss of her influence there. As a nation, we rise or fall as the character of our home, presided over by women, rises or falls, and the best gauge of our prosperity is to be found in the measure by which these homes find multiplication in the land. In true marriage, and the struggle after the highest ordeal of home-life, is to be found the solution of more of the ugly problems that confront the present generation--moral, social and political--than we have space to enumerate.-Am. Odd Fellow.