en, is humanity." Reformers
can be as bigoted and sectarian and as ready to malign each other, as
the Church in its darkest periods has been to persecute its
dissenters.

So utterly had the women been deserted in the Kansas campaign by those
they had the strongest reason to look to for help, that at times all
effort seemed hopeless. The editors of the New York _Tribune_ and the
_Independent_ can never know how wistfully, from day to day, their
papers were searched for some inspiring editorials on the woman's
amendment, but naught was there; there were no words of hope and
encouragement, no eloquent letters from an Eastern man that could be
read to the people; all were silent. Yet these two papers, extensively
taken all over Kansas, had they been as true to woman as to the negro,
could have revolutionized the State. But with arms folded, Greeley,
Curtis, Tilton, Beecher, Higginson, Phillips, Garrison, Frederick
Douglass, all calmly watched the struggle from afar, and when defeat
came to both propositions, no consoling words were offered for woman's
loss, but the women who spoke in the campaign were reproached for
having "killed negro suffrage."

[Illustration: Olympia Brown.]

We wondered then at the general indifference to that first opportunity
of realizing what all those gentlemen had advocated so long; and, in
looking back over the many intervening years, we still wonder at the
stolid incapacity of all men to understand that woman feels the
invidious distinctions of sex exactly as the black man does those of
color, or the white man the more transient distinctions of wealth,
family, position, place, and power; that she feels as keenly as man
the injustice of disfranchisement. Of the old abolitionists who stood
true to woman's cause in this crisis, Robert Purvis, Parker Pillsbury,
and Rev. Samuel J. May were the only Eastern men. Through all the hot
debates during the period of reconstruction, again and again, Mr.
Purvis arose and declared, that he would rather his son should never
be enfranchised, unless his daughter could be also, that, as she bore
the double curse of sex and color, on every principle of justice she
should first be protected. These were the only men who felt and
understood as women themselves do the degradation of disfranchisement.

Twenty years ago, as now, the Gibraltar of our difficulties was the
impossibility of making the best men feel that woman is aggravated by
the endless petty distincti