ot the mere
dropping of the ballot once or twice a year on the part of woman
to which public opinion is such a dead set. It is that which
follows the ballot, that which the ballot involves. It is the
office holding, the introduction of woman into public life, this
stepping outside of what has always been considered her
particular sphere. And so these women, who are memorializing
Legislatures to deny their sisters the ballot, are doing our
work, in that they are breaking the crust of that bitter
prejudice which says that a woman's business is to keep house and
tend babies, utterly regardless of the fact that every community
contains scores of women who have neither houses to keep, nor
babies to tend; doing our work in their own way, to be sure, in a
way that reflects little credit on their good sense, but we shall
not be particular about that if they are not. My verdict for such
women is, let them alone. We shall be the losers if they ever
find out their mistake.

But that kind of opposition which we dread the most, which takes
the courage out of the most courageous, and the heart out of the
most earnest, is the opposition of utter insensibility, of stolid
indifference, which the mass of women exhibit, not only to this
question, but to any question that does not touch their immediate
personal interests. If I had a cause, of whatever kind, to
advocate on its merits alone, one argument to make that appealed
to a reasonable intellect, a discriminating judgment, I should
want an audience not of women. It is a sad, a humiliating fact
that the great mass of women are not thinkers.

* * * * *

At the morning session Colonel HIGGINSON read a letter from Henry
Ward Beecher.

BROOKLYN, N. Y., Nov. 18, 1870.

MRS. LUCY STONE:--My Dear Madam--You were kind enough to ask
me to allow my name to be used again in connection with the
presidency of the American Woman Suffrage Association. But,
after reflection, I am persuaded that it will be better to
put in nomination some one who can give more time to the
affairs of the society than I can and who can at least
attend its meetings, which I find it impossible to do. But,
while I detach myself