to adopt any of the complimentary phrases in your letter as being
applicable to me, I readily comply with your request to give my
opinion as to the propriety of the admission of the female
delegates into the Convention.

I should premise by avowing that my first impression was strong
against that admission; and I believe I declared that opinion in
private conversation. But when I was called on by you to give my
personal decision on the subject, I felt it my duty to
investigate the grounds of the opinion I had formed; and upon
that investigation I easily discovered that it was founded on no
better grounds than an apprehension of the ridicule it might
excite if the Convention were to do what is so unusual in
England--admit women to an equal share and right of the
discussion. I also without difficulty recognized that this was an
unworthy, and, indeed, a cowardly motive, and I easily overcame
its influence.

My mature consideration of the entire subject convinces me of the
right of the female delegates to take their seats in the
Convention, and of the injustice of excluding them. I do not care
to add that I deem it also impolitic; because, that exclusion
being unjust, it ought not to have taken place even if it could
also be politic. My reasons are:

_First._ That as it has been the practice in America for females
to act as delegates and office-bearers, as well as in common
capacity of members of Anti-Slavery Societies, the persons who
called this Convention ought to have warned the American
Anti-Slavery Societies to confine their choice to males, and for
want of this caution many female delegates have made long
journeys by land and crossed the ocean to enjoy a right which
they had no reason to fear would be withheld from them at the end
of their tedious voyage.

_Secondly._ The cause which is so intimately interwoven with
every good feeling of humanity and with the highest and most
sacred principles of Christianity--the Anti-Slavery cause in
America--is under the greatest, the deepest, the most
heart-binding obligations to the females who have joined the
Anti-Slavery Societies in the United States. They have shown a
passive but permanent courage, which ought to put many of the
male advocates to the blush. The American ladies have p