men, women, and children justly are. As to the 'Woman's Rights
movement,' it is not peculiar to America, it is part of a great wave
in the incoming tide of modern civilization; the swell is felt no less
in Europe, but it combs over and breaks on our American shore, because
our great wide beach affords the best play for its waters; and as the
ocean waves bring with them kelp, seaweed, mud, sand, gravel, and even
putrefying debris, which lie unsightly on the shore, and yet, on the
whole, are healthful and refreshing,--so the Woman's Rights movement,
with its conventions, its speech-makings, its crudities, and
eccentricities, is nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary
movement of the human race towards progress. This question of Woman
and her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age. We have put
Slavery under foot, and with the downfall of Slavery the only obstacle
to the success of our great democratic experiment is overthrown, and
there seems no limit to the splendid possibilities which it may open
before the human race.

"In the reconstruction that is now coming there lies more than the
reconstruction of States and the arrangement of the machinery of
government. We need to know and feel, all of us, that, from the moment
of the death of Slavery, we parted finally from the regime and control
of all the old ideas formed under old oppressive systems of society,
and came upon a new plane of life.

"In this new life we must never forget that we are a peculiar people,
that we have to walk in paths unknown to the Old World,--paths where
its wisdom cannot guide us, where its precedents can be of little use
to us, and its criticisms, in most cases, must be wholly irrelevant.
The history of our war has shown us of how little service to us in any
important crisis the opinions and advice of the Old World can be. We
have been hurt at what seemed to us the want of sympathy, the direct
antagonism, of England. We might have been less hurt if we had
properly understood that Providence had placed us in a position so far
ahead of her ideas or power of comprehension that just judgment or
sympathy was not to be expected from her.

"As we went through our great war with no help but that of God,
obliged to disregard the misconceptions and impertinences which the
foreign press rained down upon us, so, if we are wise, we shall
continue to do. Our object must now be to make the principles on which
our government is founded perm