Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/223

 little Doctress's, placed her hand upon the head of the black woman, calling her sister, and introducing her as such to the assembled crowd. It looked well and beautiful, and it was certainly felt by all that the white woman stood here as the friend and protector of the black. Miss Lucy performed her part very well, in a perfectly womanly, quiet, and beautiful manner. She then related the history of the late slave, and talked about slavery for a full hour, with perfect self-possession, perspicuity, and propriety of tone and gesture. But instead of speaking, as she might and ought to have done, from her own womanly feeling of life—instead of awakening sympathy for those wrongs which woman especially suffers in slavery, inasmuch as her very children do not belong to her; that the beings whom she brings forth in sorrow are the property of her master, and may be taken from her and sold whenever he will—instead of laying stress upon this and many other circumstances repulsive to the heart and to every sense of justice, and which especially befal the female slave; Miss Lucy struck into the common track of so-much hackneyed abuse of the pro-slavery men of the north, and against Daniel Webster and his warm zeal for Hungarian freedom, while he saw with indifference three millions of native Americans held in slavery. She repeated merely what the men had already said, and said better and more powerfully than she had done; she entirely mistook her own mission as a female speaker. When will women perceive that, if they would worthily take a place in the forum, they must come forth with the dignity and power of the being who has new and mighty truths to enunciate and represent? They must feel and speak from the centre of the sphere of woman. Not all the good-nature and courtesy of man will enable them to maintain their place on the public platform, if they do not take possession of it on their own positive ground. There is no want of this in itself; it lies near to the