Brougham and Mansfield, and others who have had the wisdom and the
courage to thrust aside false paper law and install in its place that
sovereign law which is written upon the heart and upon the very
foundations of human being! He does not doubt that they did right. He
honors them for having done as they did. Nor can he doubt that to deny
to woman all part in the making and executing of laws under which her
life and property may be taken from her is a crime against her, which
no paper law can sanction and which God's law must condemn.... This
worship of the Constitution!--how blinding and belittling! I would
that every judge who tends to this weakness (and nearly every judge,
yes, and nearly every other person tends to it) might find his steps
arrested by the warning example of Daniel Webster. This pre-eminently
intellectual man, whom nature had fitted to soar in the high sphere of
absolute and everlasting law, had so shrivelled his soul by his
worship of the Constitution that he came, at last, to desire no other
inscription on his grave-stone than his shameless confession of such
base worship. And all this, notwithstanding the Constitution was, in
his eye, the great bulwark of slavery!

Be of good courage and good cheer, my brave and faithful sister! I
trust our country is on the eve of great and blessed changes.... Best
of all, the ballot can not much longer be withheld from woman. Men are
fast coming to see that it belongs to her as fully as to themselves,
and that the country is in perishing need of her wielding it. If the
silly portion of our ladies will but cease from their silly
apprehension that the plan is to _make_ them vote whether they will or
no, and also cease from their ignorant and childish admissions that
they already have all the rights they want--then will the American
women quickly be enfranchised, and their nation will rapidly achieve a
far higher civilization than it is possible for any nation to arrive
at which is guilty of the folly and the sin of clothing man with all
political power and reducing women to a political cipher.

Cordially yours, GERRIT SMITH.

WASHINGTON NOTES.

BY GRACE GREENWOOD.

When I said that in the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt
none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the
Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of
the holy political covenant resting here--the sa