Page:Women of distinction.djvu/305

Rh a veritable "book-worm" on learning's humid page. She early became a creature of luminous ideas and a much solicited contributor to that great dissemination of public opinion, the weekly and daily press. Among the first papers to solicit and publish contributions from her pen was the Northwestern, of Oshkosh, and the Evening Wisconsin, at Milwaukee, at about which time, in the event of the United States Supreme Court declaring the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional, her column and a half article on "The Rights of Colored People," or "A Plea for the Negro," which appeared in the Northwestern, secured for her at a leap, as it were, no mean place in the galaxy of women writers of either race, and distinctive encomiums for her quaint diction and rare logical disseminations, an idea of which may be gleaned from the following excerpt from the article mentioned above:

When a man quits his home and goes upon a public street, enters a public car or hotel, we say he becomes one of the public and has no exclusive right of occupancy. He has no right to say that a man tall or short, white or black, shall not receive the same civil treatment as himself. This we call a civil right; and we hold that to be in a car or in the same hotel does not make one man society for another any more than to occupy the same air makes all birds of one feather.

And public practice does not accord with this theory, as can be readily shown; for instance, what lady or gentleman would avoid any of the first-class hotels upon it becoming known that a Frank James, or even a Guiteau, had taken quarters there? And if the propriety of their sharing the same roof was questioned they would quickly say, "It is a public house; we do not call it associating with them," and indignantly recoil at the mere mention of these characters as their associates. But under precisely the same circumstances when it comes to the black man it is called "social equality," and the question arises. Who shall be blamed? If we question the ticket-seller or