ls, I will endeavor to
allay the disappointment by striving to reach with my pen some of
the sunset homes in the far West, and endeavor to arouse woman
there to her duties and responsibilities, that she may sympathize
more fully with her Eastern sisters, who caught the first glow of
the sunrise hour of our great reform movement. With sincere and
earnest wishes for your advancement in right and truth,

I am respectfully yours,
FRANCES D. GAGE.

Mr. HIGGINSON was then introduced. Mrs. President, and Ladies and
Gentlemen: I think, as perhaps some of you do, that a
disproportionately large portion of the time of the meeting
to-day has been taken up by the speeches of men; therefore I do
not intend that this man's speech shall be a very long one. I
remember a certain sermon, of which it was said it had nothing
good in it except its subject and its shortness. My speech is
going to be like that sermon. But there is one great advantage
which men, enjoy in speaking on a Woman's Rights platform: they
can not help doing good to the movement, no matter how they
speak; for if a man speaks well, of course he helps it by his
speech; and if he speaks ill on the subject, he still helps it,
because there are women about him who won't speak ill, and the
comparison is useful.

I wish to take up a point which, as a man, I am entitled to claim
should have more prominence given it than has yet been the case;
a point touched upon by me previously, in something I said
yesterday, which some of you thought was not correct; and a point
touched upon by Wendell Phillips this afternoon. I mean the claim
of the Woman's Rights movement on woman; the wrong done by woman
to that movement; and the injustice of the charge against man,
that he especially resists it. And yet I can not fully accept the
position taken by Rev. Mr. Johnson and Horace Greeley, that man's
duty is only to stand aside and let woman take her rights. Not
so. It is not so easy as that, let me tell you, gentlemen, to get
rid of the responsibility of years of wrong. We men have been
standing for years with our hands crushing down the shoulders of
woman, so that she should not attain her true altitude; and it is
not so easy, after we have c