centre of feeling too intense to generate a wide circle. Here,
too, the enforced inequality of institutions pursues her. The
children, born at such cost of suffering, are not hers in the eye
of the law. The right to them which nature puts primarily in the
mother, society has long vested almost absolutely in the father.
In case of any difference between them he will say, "I am the
father--my will must be obeyed." And what he will say in private
the law will say in public. Mrs. Stone records a piteous case in
which an unborn child was willed by its dying father to relatives
in a foreign country in which the widowed mother suffered the
pains of childbirth, that other hearts than hers might be
gladdened by her dearly-bought treasure. This young woman was
described as in a maze of bewilderment at the presence on the
statute-book of a law so miraculously wicked. We all hope that in
such laws there comes a great deal of dead letter, but the dead
letter itself stinks and is corrupt. The book of justice should
be purged of such unhallowed corpses.

In the nursery the mother is called upon to set forward the same
injustice which presided over her own education. "Preaching down
a daughter's heart," the beautiful phrase of Tennyson, becomes
the duty of every woman who finds in her daughter saliency of
intellect and individuality of will. Mediocrity is the standard!
"Seek not, my child, to go beyond it. Thou hast thy little
allotments. The French must be thy classics, the house accounts
thy mathematics. Patchwork, cooking, and sweeping thy mechanics;
dress and embroidery thy fine arts. See how small the spheres. Do
not venture outside of it, nor teach thy daughters, when thou
shalt have such to do so."

And so we women, from generation to generation, are drilled to be
the apes of an artificial standard, made for us and imposed upon
us by an outsider; a being who, in this attitude, becomes our
natural enemy.

Mrs. LUCY STONE said: There have always been good and able men
ready to second us, and to say their best words for our cause.
Among the first of these is Mr. George William Curtis, whom I
have now the pleasure to introduce.

_Ladies and Gentlemen:_--It is pleasant to see this large
assembly, and this generous spirit, for it is by precisel