he is laboring to redeem the
world from the curse of drunkenness.

I know not why it is not as much the duty of your sex, as it is
of mine, to establish newspapers, write books, and hold public
meetings for the promotion of the cause of temperance. The
current idea, that modesty should hold women back from such
services, is all resolvable into nonsense and wickedness. Female
modesty! female delicacy! I would that I might never again hear
such phrases. There is but one standard of modesty and delicacy
for both men and women; and so long as different standards are
tolerated, both sexes will be perverse and corrupt. It is my duty
to be as modest and delicate as you are; and if your modesty and
delicacy may excuse you from making a public speech, then may
mine excuse me from making one.

The Quakers are the best people I have ever known--the most
serious and chaste, and yet the most brave and resisting. But
there is no other people who are so little concerned, lest man
get out of his sphere, or lest woman get out of hers. No people
make so little difference as they do, between man and woman.
Others appear to think that the happiness and safety of the world
consist in magnifying the difference. But when reason and
religion shall rule the world, there will be felt to be no other
difference between man and woman, than that of their physical
constitutions. None will then be acknowledged in respect to the
intellect, the heart, or the manners.

Very respectfully, your friend,
GERRIT SMITH.

The attendance at this Convention was larger than the year previous,
and the debates more interesting, as Mrs. Nichols, William Henry
Channing, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown, and Frederick Douglass all
took an active part in the proceedings. During one of the sessions
quite a heated discussion took place on the subject of Divorce, Mrs.
Stanton and Lucy Stone taking the ground that it was not only woman's
right, but her duty, to withdraw from all such unholy relations, Mrs.
Nichols and Miss Brown taking the opposite position.

As it was decided at this second convention to admit gentlemen, a
schism was the immediate result. By their party tactics, in which they
were well versed, they took the initiative steps to scatter the forces
so successfull