ons because of sex, precisely as the most
cultivated man, black or white, suffers the distinctions of color,
wealth, or position. Take a man of superior endowments, once powerful
and respected, who through unfortunate circumstances is impoverished
and neglected; he sees small men, unscrupulous, hard, grinding men
taking places of trust and influence, making palace homes for
themselves and children, while his family in shabby attire are
ostracised in the circle where by ancestry and intelligence they
belong, made to feel on all occasions the impassable gulf that lies
between riches and poverty. That man feels for himself and doubly for
his children the humiliation. And yet with the ever-turning wheel of
fortune such distinctions are transient; yours to-day, mine
to-morrow. That glorious Scotch poet, Robert Burns, from the depths of
his poverty and despair, might exclaim in an inspired moment on the
divine heights where the human soul can sometimes mount:

"A man's a man for a' that."

But the wail through many of his sad lines shows that he had tasted
the very dregs of the cup of poverty, and hated all distinctions based
on wealth.

When a colored man of education and wealth like Robert Purvis, of
Philadelphia, surrounded with a family of cultivated sons and
daughters, was denied all social communion with his neighbors, equal
freedom and opportunity for himself and children, in public
amusements, churches, schools, and means of travel because of race, he
felt the degradation of color. The poor white man might have said, If
I were Robert Purvis, with a good bank account, and could live in my
own house, ride in my own carriage, and have my children well fed and
clothed, I should not care if we were all as black as the ace of
spades. But he had never tried the humiliation of color, and could not
understand its peculiar aggravations, as he did those of poverty. It
is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another. The
coarser forms of slavery all can see and deplore, but the subjections
of the spirit, few either comprehend or appreciate. In our day women
carrying heavy burdens on their shoulders while men walk by their side
smoking their pipes, or women harnessed to plows and carts with cows
and dogs while men drive, are sights which need no eloquent appeals to
move American men to pity and indignation. But the subtle humiliations
of women possessed of wealth, education, and genius, men on the same
plan