he impression made upon me at the
time does not diminish. I still wonder at the showing of such a solid
power of work, such untiring industry, such prophetic foresight and
intuition, so grand a trust in human nature. These gifts were well-nigh
put out of sight by a singularly modest estimate of self. Truly, this
was a knight of God's own order. I cannot but doubt whether he left his
peer on earth.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

I sometimes feel as if words could not express the comfort and
instruction which have come to me in the later years of my life from two
sources. One of these has been the better acquaintance with my own sex;
the other, the experience of the power resulting from associated action
in behalf of worthy objects.

During the first two thirds of my life I looked to the masculine ideal
of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and
referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. In an
unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me a world of thought
and of character quite beyond the limits within which I had hitherto
been content to abide. The new domain now made clear to me was that of
true womanhood,--woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her
opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and
purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and
every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a
new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old
ordinances.

"Oh, had I earlier known the power, the nobility, the intelligence which
lie within the range of true womanhood, I had surely lived more wisely
and to better purpose." Such were my reflections; yet I must think that
the great Lord of all reserved this new revelation as the crown of a
wonderful period of the world's emancipation and progress.

It did not come to me all at once. In my attempts at philosophizing I at
length reached the conclusion that woman must be the moral and spiritual
equivalent of man. How, otherwise, could she be entrusted with the awful
and inevitable responsibilities of maternity? The quasi-adoration that
true lovers feel, was it an illusion partly of sense, partly of
imagination? or did it symbolize a sacred truth?

While my mind was engaged with these questions, the civil war came to an
end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full
dignity of citizenship. The wome