encounters in
the present social and political arrangements of the world. You know
the old maxim, "The gods help them who help themselves." This is true
of all times and circumstances. The two inevitable conditions that are
found in, and are essential to all bondage, are the spirit of
oppression, the desire to exercise unlawful dominion on the one side,
and ignorance, servility, the willingness, if not the desire to be
enslaved on the other. The absence of either is fatal to the existence
of the thing itself.

I apprehend the principal thing you want from our sex, as a
preliminary to your growth and equal position in the great struggle of
life, is what Diogenes wanted of Alexander, viz., that we shall "get
out of your sunshine." In other words, that we shall remove the
obstacles we have placed in your way. To this end, politically, all
laws which discriminate between man and woman, to the injury of the
latter, should at once be blotted out. Women should have an equal
voice in the creation and administration of that government to which
they are subject. This will be a fair start in that direction. The
first thing to be done, socially, is to so regulate and arrange the
industrial machinery that women shall have an equal chance to labor in
all the departments, and that the same work shall receive the same pay
whether done by man or woman. This will do much to clear the track, so
that all can have a fair chance. This is all you ask, as I take it.
This you should have. Justice demands it....

But, save in the removal of the outward forms of society, which now
environ and hedge up your way, the active work in all this change in
the most important human relations must be done by yourselves. "They
who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." What woman is
capable of we shall never know until she has a fair chance in the wide
arena of universal human life.

If the love of frivolity and show and of empty admiration, which now
so generally obtains, is an unfailing characteristic in the female
sex, legislation can not help you. Encouragement, sympathy, can not
help you. It is of no use to fight against the eternal laws. But if
this be only a perversion or misdirection of noble and lovely powers
and faculties, the result of accidental circumstances and vicious
institutions, as I believe, then, when the outward pressure is
removed, the elastic spring of the genuine human spirit, encased in
the form of woman, shall return;