,
lectured before the Young Men's Association to a large audience,
and met there many liberal men and women. I found that the Rev.
Mr. Harrison had just fired a gun in the town paper on the lack
of logic in the Chicago Convention and women's intuitions in
general. It amuses me to hear the nonsense these men talk. They
say God never intended woman to reason, they shut their college
doors against her so that she can not study that manly
accomplishment, and then they blame her for taking a short cut to
the same conclusion they reach in their roundabout, lumbering
processes of ratiocination. Do these gentlemen wish us to set
aside God's laws, pick up logic on the sidewalks, and go step by
step to a point we can reach with one flash of intuition? As long
as we have the gift of catching truth by the telegraph wires,
neither the sage of Bloomington nor Robert Laird Collyer of
Chicago need ask us to go jogging after it in a stage-coach,
perchance to be stuck in the mud on the highways as they are. It
is enough to make angels weep to see how the logicians, skilled
in the schools, are left floundering on every field before the
simple intuitions of American womanhood.

Finding the ladies of Bloomington somewhat scarified and nervous
under the Reverend's firing, like the good Samaritan, I tried to
pour oil and wine on their wounded spirits, by exalting
intuition, and with a pitiful and patronizing tone deploring the
slowness, the obtuseness, the materialism of most of the sons of
Adam. It had its effect. They soon dried their tears, and with
returning self-respect, told me of all the wonderful things women
were doing in that town. From the scintillations of wit, the fun
and the laughter, an outsider would never have supposed that we
were an oppressed class, and so hopelessly degraded in the
statute laws and Constitution. After the meeting we had a long
talk with the clerical assailant, and were happy to find that the
good man's pen had done his heart great injustice. He is rather
morbid on the question of logic; but the most melancholy symptom
of his disease is his hatred of _The Revolution_. He says it is a
very wicked paper, that he had felt it his duty to warn his
congregation against taking it, thus depriving us of, at least,
five hundred subscr