meagerly! But, remembering that a single just thought, or vital truth,
communicated to intelligent minds and willing hearts, is an investment
sure of increase, I will bless God for the pen, and ask of Him to make
it a tongue for humanity.

The limits of a written communication will forbid me to say much, and
I would address myself to a single point broached in your Albany
Convention, and a point that seems to me of the first importance;
because a mistake in morals, a wrong perpetrated in the home
relations, is the greatest of all wrongs to humanity. And marred,
indeed, would be your triumph, if, in preventing the repeal of one
unjust statute, you sanction the enactment of another. So true it is
that one injustice becomes the source of another, I fear to
contemplate the enactment of a trifling encroachment even upon
inalienable rights or divinely sanctioned pursuits.

In addressing myself to the position that "drunkenness be made a good
and sufficient cause for divorce," I am secured from any fear that you
will regard me as warring with abstractions, since such a bill has
found its way into your Legislature, proving that the popular sympathy
for suffering women and children is already concentrating on divorce
as the remedy. I have hesitated about addressing you on this subject,
lest I might render myself obnoxious to the charge of diverting the
objects of your meeting, to an occasion for the discussion of
forbidden topics. But an irresistible conviction, that since the
subject is already launched upon your reform, it is important that a
just view of its bearings should be presented, impels me to throw
myself upon your sympathy, trusting in the divine power of truth to
commend both my motives and my positions to your judgments and your
hearts.

And first, let me say, I would not be understood as opposed to
emancipating the wretched victims of irremediable abuse. And if there
be a benevolence, under the warm heaven of Almighty Love, it is the
protecting of helplessness and innocence from the sufferings that
result, inevitably, from the rum traffic. But while I fully agree with
Mrs. Stanton, that no pure-hearted and understanding woman can
innocently become the mother of a drunkard's offspring--while I rely
upon the general diffusion of physiological truths to create a
sentiment abhorrent to the idea of raising a posterity, the breath of
whose life shall be derived from the animalized and morally tainted
vitality of th