Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/912

874 thousands of dollars and a large amount of food and clothing furnished by the Government and by private benevolence, and done all wisely and well and for long periods of time without material fee or reward.

Rarely, indeed, do we find such tender charity, such ability for continuous labor, and such spiritual beauty of life as hers, and her departure is no doubt the result of her too severe and self-sacrificing career of good works.

From 10 to 4  to-day the remains may be seen by her many friends at her late home, on Capitol Hill, and to-night her daughters go with all that is mortal of a most tender and loving mother to the family burial-place in her native town of Hebron, Conn.—Washington Chronicle.

June 27, 1870.


 * —Yours so kind and interesting came duly, and I thank you. I am sure you have seen how some genius, greater, more powerful than myself controls me and forbids me to seek enjoyment in human friendships. If you comprehend my life, you will pardon long silence of the tips, and join me in the prayer, that the poor all taken into "Abraham's bosom," I may enjoy those I love, in heaven. I am pained when I think that not only you, but my dear father in his affliction, has been neglected, for it is now four long weeks since I have written a word of love and consolation to him. But the days are so full of work, and the nights of thinking, that all my vitality seems to be in requisition, and I sometimes think there is no reserve force left in me. Oh, how I wish our Christianity would be true to itself, and take to its heart the great questions of humanity, then would I turn over a precious few of the starving old people now calling upon God and me for their support, to churches, and enter the field for woman.

How grandly the tide is lashing the shore on both sides of the Atlantic, and its voice is the voice of God, commanding once more that ye "let my people go, that they may serve me." Only the foam and the surge are seen to-day—"Woman and the Ballot." But there is overturning and upheaving below, and the great depths shall ere long become the surface, and what is now seen In the social realm and believed in, as a religious creed, must enter into the formation, geologically conforming to fossilization and decay; so the last shall be first, and the first last. The last half century is a grand prophecy. How slavery went down, carrying away social and religious systems with it! There they lie, like dust and ashes in the rear. None are found so poor and benighted as to do homage at their shrine. It was the moral agitation that gave spiritual birth to the race enslaved. I remember to have felt great impatience at the tardy and conservative elements that entered into the struggle side by side with the radical leaders of 1845, when to me the issue was not with the Constitution, nor even with the pulpit, nor the Bible, but with Justice. It was man to man, stripped of all but the Divine within him. The lessons of moral and political formation in its slow but certain work, come to strengthen me now. To my mind the issue of to-day in the woman cause is clearly not what Paul taught and thought, nor what God has settled upon her as her dower, nor what the marriage contract makes her, but it is woman as a beneficent genius, next to the angels, against woman below the beasts, in human society under the heel of the Law, in the arms of brute force, crushed to death with passion and lust. Lucy Stone has made it obvious to the world that six plates, six teacups and saucers, and a guardian for her children, at the time of her husband's death, are not her only legitimate property. Mrs. Stanton goes further, and declares that not alone is her property sacred, and must be restored to her, but that personal freedom, subject to the Moral Law, not to the law of Society, nor of Government, if those powers contravene or interfere with God's Law as it is written in her own constitution.

In so much as woman is endowed by the Creator with the most loving and beneficent genius or nature capable of enduring the agonies of many deaths, to give life to many souls, in so much she is entitled to command, not left to obey. So says Mrs. Stanton; I agree with her. Both Lucy Stone and Mrs. Stanton are skilled workmen. Both representative women; representing the two wings in the cause of woman's freedom.

You speak of Mrs. Stanton's view in the McFarland-Richardson case. I knew but little of the real character of Mrs. Richardson, but if what is acknowledged to be true of