; I have got rights enough." Many a
lady, whose husband is what he ought to be, whose father is what
fathers ought to be, feeling no want unsupplied, is ready to say,
"I have all the rights I want." So the daughter of Louis
Sixteenth, in the troublous time of 1791, when somebody told her
that the people were starving in the streets of Paris, exclaimed,
"What fools! I would eat bread first!" Thus wealth, comfort, and
ease say, "I have rights enough." Nobody doubted it, madam! But
the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless
wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter
of toil, whose earnings are filched from her by the rum debts of
a selfishness which the law makes to have a right over her, in
the person of a husband. The question is not of you, it is of
some friendless woman of twenty, standing at the door of the
world, educated, capable, desirous of serving her time and her
race, and saying, "Where shall I use these talents? How shall I
earn bread?" And orthodox society, cabined and cribbed in St.
Paul, cries out, "Go sew, jade! We have no other channel for you.
Go to the needle, or wear yourself to death as a
school-mistress." We come here to endeavor to convince you, and
so to shape our institutions that public opinion, following in
the wake, shall be willing to open channels for the agreeable and
profitable occupation of women as much as for men. People blame
the shirt-makers and tailors because they pay two cents where
they ought to pay fifty. It is not their fault. They are nothing
but the weathercocks, and society is the wind. Trade does not
grow out of the Sermon on the Mount; merchants never have any
hearts, they have only ledgers; two per cent. a month is their
Sermon on the Mount, and a balance on the wrong side of the
ledger is their demonstration. (Laughter). Nobody finds fault
with them for it. Everything according to the law of its life. A
man pays as much for making shirts or coats as it is necessary to
pay, and he would be a fool and a bankrupt if he paid any more.
He needs only a hundred workwomen; there are a thousand women
standing at his door saying, "Give us work; and if it is worth
ten cents to do it, we will do it for two"; and a hundred get the
work, and nine hundred are turned into