c law. With
undiminished hope and faith, yours,

CAROLINE M. SEVERANCE.

HARTFORD, _April 22, 1866_.

DEAR MADAM:--I learn by a circular I have received that a Woman's
Rights Convention is to be held in New York in May. I can not have the
pleasure of attending it, but I would like to take this opportunity of
telling you I am with you, heart and soul, in this cause--of thanking
you, and those with whom you are associated, for the noble work you
have done, and are doing, in the cause of universal suffrage. There
never was a more opportune time for calling a convention of this kind
than the present, when it is evident that the United States
Constitution is about to undergo some repairs--when all the so-called
radicals in Congress are trying to have it so altered as to insure the
disfranchisement of one-half the nation. They have so strangely
perverted the meaning of the term "universal suffrage," that it is a
misnomer as at present used by them. It is rather significant of the
"universality" of the suffrage intended, that every one of these
special guardians of freedom refused to present Congress a petition
for woman's enfranchisement; that the Massachusetts Senator who leads
the van of freedom's host, did, finally, most reluctantly present it
with one hand, while taking good care to deal it a blow with the other
that would prove a most effectual quietus to it; that a representative
[Mr. Boutwell], after repeating the self-evident truth that "there can
be no just government without the consent of the governed," says that
"man is endowed by nature with the priority of right to the vote
rather than woman or child;" that the two Senators from Massachusetts
have each proposed amendments to the Constitution holding out
inducements to the States to enfranchise all male inhabitants, but
none to enfranchise women, when they could have included them by
omitting one word; that that light of freedom, Mr. Greeley, of the
_Tribune_, states that "men express the public sense as fully as if
women voted" [speech in Suffield, Conn., last June]. These are a few
of the straws pointing to that sham labeled "universal suffrage."

The conservatives of the slave-driving school have had an odious
enough reputation, but I never heard of any of them taking measures to
so amend the Constitution as to insure the perpetuation of the
disfranchisement of six