peace cause. Her address to the congress was printed and distributed at the Exposition. She was also present and presented a paper in the Woman's Rights Congress in Paris. She represented the union in the Woman's Council held in Washington, D. C. in March, 1888, and signalized the occasion by calling a grand peace meeting in the Church of Our Father, where many prominent women made addresses. In addition to her arduous work in the ministry for the last six years, preaching three times each Sabbath day and attending funerals and weddings, she has been an active worker in the temperance and prohibition cause, and at one time traveled and lectured for that interest and organized its work. That labor she still continues as opportunity will permit; but her great work is her effort to substitute peace for war and harmonize the difficulties constantly arising in families, neighborhoods and churches. By the efforts of herself and her husband, the Dutchess County Peace Society, one of the large and flourishing branches of the Universal Peace Union, was organized in 1875 and kept by them in active life until her ministerial duties made it necessary to turn over the work to others.
ABBY MORTON DIAZ
DIAZ, Mrs. Abby Morton, industrial reformer, born in Plymouth, Mass., in 1821. She is descended from George Morton, one of the Plymouth Pilgrims. Her father, Ichabod Morton, was a prominent anti-slavery worker. Her early reccollections {{SIC}} are associated with anti-slavery meetings, and her first public work was as the secretary of a juvenile anti-slavery society, to whose funds each member aimed to contribute twenty-five cents weekly, a large sum in those days of scanty pence and simple living. To raise half her contribution she went without butter and knit garters to earn the other twelve. Educated in the public schools, she kept her influence at work, using for her homemade copy-books sheets of paper with the figure of a kneeling slave upon them. Among the men to whose utterances Abby Morton listened were Garrison and Horace Mann. She early began to put her thoughts on paper. While aiding in the work of her home, she found time to write prose and verse. She was the only daughter, and her five brothers made plenty of work for her. When the "community" ideas were started, her father seized upon them as promising realization of his hope for the practical recognition of the brotherhood of the race, and joined the celebrated Brook Farm Community, building a house and moving there with his family. A few weeks convinced him of the failure of the scheme, and he returned to Plymouth and resumed his business. Mrs. Diaz' married life was very brief, and she was left with two little sons to care for. When the boys were small, she cut and made their garments, taught a juvenile singing school, private and public schools, and was for one summer housekeeper at a summer resort on an island near Plymouth, where she did all the bread and cake making, because her cook was unsatisfactory. At one time she "put out" work for a large clothing house and in visiting the "lofts" where this was done she received harsh proofs of the poorly paid work of skillful women, who had no other recourse. In 1861 Mrs. Diaz sent a story to the "Atlantic Monthly," under an assumed name, and was delighted with her success when it was accepted and she received a check for forty dollars for it. From that time she took up her life work, to reach and help her fellows through her pen. Her stories for children, originally published in "Young Folks" and other magazines, have a wide fame, and series after series, beginning with "William Henry's Letters to His Grandmother," "Pink and Blue," "The Little Country Girl," "Farmer Hill's Diary," "The Schoolmaster's Story" and "Some Account of the Early Life of a Bachelor," were full of the subtle yet simple humor that imbues all Mrs. Diaz's writings. When Rev. Edward
