rom woman's hand into the ballot-box, the beauty and sentiment,
the bloom and sweetness, of womankind will go with it. But in this
matter it seems to me that we can trust Nature. Stronger than statutes
or conventions, she will be conservative of all that the true man loves
and honors in woman. Here and there may be found an equivocal, unsexed
Chevalier D'Eon, but the eternal order and fitness of things will remain.
I have no fear that man will be less manly or woman less womanly when
they meet on terms of equality before the law.

On the other hand, I do not see that the exercise of the ballot by woman
will prove a remedy for all the evils of which she justly complains. It
is her right as truly as mine, and when she asks for it, it is something
less than manhood to withhold it. But, unsupported by a more practical
education, higher aims, and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of
life and duty, it is not likely to prove a blessing in her hands any more
than in man's.

With great respect and hearty sympathy, I am very truly thy friend.

ITALIAN UNITY

AMESBURY, MASS., 1st Mo., 4th, 1871.

Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration
of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy.

IT would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on
the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation
of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.

For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular
movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the
deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries. I
looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their
ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings. Had I been a Catholic instead of a
Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from
Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical,
desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty
which I prized so highly for myself.

I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited
its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic
under Mazzini and Garibaldi. From that hour it was doomed, and the
expiation of its monstrous crime is still going on. My sympathies are
with Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish and
sust