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Rh silent presence would bring justice; but justice has not come. The world has talked of universal suffrage; but it has made it universal only to man. It is time we spoke and acted. It is time we gave man faith in woman — and, still more, woman faith in herself. It is time both men and women knew that whatever has been achieved by woman in the realm of mind or matter, has been achieved by right womanly women. Let us then work, and continue to work, until the world shall assent to our right to do whatever the capacities God has given us enable us to do.

rose and said that several gentlemen had handed her contributions, one $40, another $25. She trusted that all New York men and women would find they had something more to do than listen to speeches.

November 22, 1856.

— You are promised to be present and speak at the approaching "Woman's Rights Convention." I, too, mean to attend its deliberations, or some portion thereof, but not to take part in them. For I find this evil apparently inseparable from all Radical gatherings: a very large and influential portion of the press, including, I grieve to say, religious as well as secular journals, are prone and eager to expose to odium those whom they would undermine and destroy, by attributing to them, not the sentiments they have personally expressed, but those of others with whom they are or have been associated in some reformatory movement. He, then, who appears as a speaker at a Woman's Rights Convention is made responsible for whatever may be uttered at such Convention — no matter by whom — which is most likely to excite popular prejudice and arouse popular hostility. I have borne a good share of this unfairly excited and unjust odium, with regard to the dietetic, anti-slavery, and social reforms suggested in our day, and shall bear on as patiently as I may; but I grow older, and do not confront the world on a fresh issue with so light a heart, so careless a defiance, as I might have done twenty years ago. Allow me, then, through you, to say what I think of the woman's rights movement, its objects, incitements, and limitations. If I may thus attain perspicuity, I can bear the imputation of egotism.

1. I deem the intellectual, like the physical capacities of women unequal in the average to those of men; but I perceive no reason in this natural diversity for a factitious and superinduced legal inequality. On the contrary, it seems to me that the fact of a natural and marked discrepancy in the average mental as well as muscular powers of men and women ought to allay any apprehensions that the latter, in the absence of legal interdicts and circumscriptions, would usurp the functions and privileges of the former.

2. I believe the range of employment for woman, in our age and country, far too restricted, and the average recompense of her labor, consequently far less than it should be. In saying this, I do not intimate a doubt that the best possible employment for most women is to be found in the care and management of their own households respectively, with the rearing and training of their children. But many women, including