WEST NEWTON, _May 6, 1866_.

E. C. STANTON, _President Executive Committee Women's Rights
Association_:

MY DEAR MRS. S.:--I had hoped to be present at this, our eleventh
anniversary, but find it impossible. And so, at the last moment, I
hasten to express my earnest conviction that now, as never before, we
are called upon for vigorous, united action--that we are left no
alternative but an unflinching protest against the strange legislation
by which a Republican Congress, so-called, assumes to engraft upon our
national Constitution, as "amendments!" clauses which not only allow
rebels to disfranchise loyal soldiers, who have borne the flag of the
Republic victoriously against their treason and rebellion, but to keep
the ballot from the hands of all women!

If not moved by an enlightened appreciation of the first principles of
political economy and social justice in legislation touching them
heretofore, we could scarcely believe that after the record made by
both the proscribed classes during our late fearful struggle, our
legislators could gravely stoop to brand them anew as "aliens" and
outlaws! It is an act as discreditable to their hearts and their moral
sense as to their statesmanship. And upon their shoulders must rest
the responsibility of an agitation to which we are thus forced--an
agitation which we have hesitated to arouse while so many vital
questions touching the future of the negro were awaiting settlement,
and in which we are acting strictly on the defensive. Under the
magnificent utterance of our brave Senator Sumner--which was an
inspiration and a prophecy--we looked to see all faltering and
compromise, so fatal in all our past, so fatal always and everywhere,
swept like dew before the sun. But the old fears and falterings return
sevenfold reinforced to renew a puerile and patch-work legislation,
which, while asserting the truth, submits to, nay, invites a fresh
struggle over each separate application of the same "self-evident
truth." What remains for us, then, but to turn from a Congress from
which we had hoped so much, which might have dared anything in the
interest of loyalty and justice, as our brave brethren turned, from a
recreant President to the people, whom he and Congress have not dared
to trust, and resolve to do our utmost to awaken a public sentiment
which only slumbers, but is not dead, and which shall make impossible
such burlesques, such infamous "amendments" to our organi