will request hereafter to be read here. We can do little or
nothing without such an organ. We have no opportunity now to
repel slander, and are restricted in disseminating truth, from
the want of such an organ. _The Tribune_, and some other papers
in the country, have treated us generously; but a paper to
represent us must be sustained by ourselves. We must look to our
own resources. We must work out our own salvation, and God grant
it be not in fear and trembling! Woman must henceforth be the
redeemer, the regenerator of the world. We plead not for
ourselves alone, but for Humanity. We must place woman on a
higher platform, and she will raise the race to her side. We
should have a literature of our own, a printing-press and a
publishing-house, and tract writers and distributors, as well as
lectures and conventions; and yet I say this to a race of
beggars, for women have no pecuniary resources.

Well, then, we must work, we must hold property, and claim the
consequent right to representation, or refuse to be taxed. Our
aim is nothing less than an overthrow of our present partial
legislation, that every American citizen, whether man or woman,
may have a voice in the laws by which we are governed. We do not
aim at idle distinction, but while we would pull down our present
worn-out and imperfect human institutions, we would help to
reconstruct them upon a new and broader foundation.

LUCY STONE: It seems to me that the claims we make at these
Conventions are self-evident truths. The second resolution
affirms the right of human beings to their persons and earnings.
Is not that self-evident? Yet the common law which regulates the
relation of husband and wife, and which is modified only in a
very few instances where there are statutes to the contrary,
gives the "custody" of the wife's person to her husband, so that
he has a right to her even against herself. It gives him her
earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired,
or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It
gives him a right to her personal property, which he may will
entirely from her, also the use of her real estate; and in some
of the States, married women, insane persons, and idiots are
ranked together as not fit to make a will. So that she is lef