ble in the next generation; and out of families
nations are made.

"Have you ever noticed one thing?" says I to the people about me.
"Whenever women get dissatisfied with themselves and hanker after the
rights of men, the very foundations of life seem to be breaking up all
around us. Marriage ties fall into ashes like fire in hatcheled flax,
morals are burned up, families torn to pieces, and society falls into
revolt against law and religion. When women begin to hanker after votes,
they hanker after divorces too, and, while they want unlimited power
with men, throw away the noblest of all power over men--that of honest
respect and a sacred consciousness of protecting."

If women will break through all the delicate safeguards and childlike
purity which keeps them so much above men, that they are aspired after
and worshipped, let them take the consequences. To be hustled in
conventions, hissed off from platforms, and received with hidden sneers
by three-fourths of mankind, doesn't seem to me half so pleasant and
respectable as the friendship of one's neighbors, and the love of one's
own family; but, if they like it better, I haven't the least mite of an
objection. Only such things force an honest woman into awful bad
company once in a while, and it sometimes happens that ambition leads
them to shake hands with persons that sweet charity itself could never
persuade the best of them to touch with a ten-foot pole.

"Don't think," says I, "that I go against female progress, or would stop
its infinite capabilities--far from it. There are questions mixed up
with this subject that ought to have our warmest sympathy and most
ardent help. Female labor is one of them, and in that lies the greatest
moral question of these times.

"When a woman finds herself doing the work nature carved out for her,
with a man crowding her out, doing no more, yet getting double pay, only
because he happens to be a man, it is a burning shame and disgrace to
both sexes. If that injustice can't be swept away by fair means, I go in
for trying any that a female woman can handle without bringing herself
down to a level with the males who seem to be as sick of being men as
some of our sex are of being women.

"Still, it seems to me that the best way of doing this is by such
appeals for justice as have brought the women of New York State more
freedom than they know what to do with. At this day there is no legal
slavery for any woman in the great Empire