d wonders
whether they ever had fathers and brothers. One would think, upon their
showing, that all men were a set of ruffians, in league against
women,--they seeming, at the same time, to forget how on their very
platforms the most constant and gallant defenders of their rights are
men. Wendell Phillips and Wentworth Higginson have put at the service of
the cause masculine training and manly vehemence, and complacently
accepted the wholesale abuse of their own sex at the hands of their
warrior sisters. One would think, were all they say of female powers
true, that our Joan-of-Arcs ought to have disdained to fight under male
captains."

"I think," said my wife, "that, in all this talk about the rights of
men, and the rights of women, and the rights of children, the world
seems to be forgetting what is quite as important, the _duties_ of men
and women and children. We all hear of our _rights_ till we forget our
_duties_; and even theology is beginning to concern itself more with
what man has a right to expect of his Creator than what the Creator has
a right to expect of man."

"You say the truth," said I; "there is danger of just this overaction:
and yet rights must be discussed; because, in order to understand the
duties, we owe to any class, we must understand their rights. To know
our duties to men, women, and children, we must know what the rights of
men, women, and children justly are. As to the 'Woman's Rights
movement,' it is not peculiar to America, it is part of a great wave in
the incoming tide of modern civilization; the swell is felt no less in
Europe, but it combs over and breaks on our American shore, because our
great wide beach affords the best play for its waters: and as the ocean
waves bring with them kelp, sea-weed, mud, sand, gravel, and even
putrefying debris, which lie unsightly on the shore, and yet, on the
whole, are healthful and refreshing,--so the Woman's Rights movement,
with its conventions, its speech-makings, its crudities and
eccentricities, is nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary
movement of the human race towards progress. This question of Woman and
her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age. We have put Slavery
under foot, and with the downfall of Slavery the only obstacle to the
success of our great democratic experiment is overthrown, and there
seems no limit to the splendid possibilities which it may open before
the human race.

"In the reconstruction that is