Such brutal faces as I saw! Ignorance, cruelty,
subserviency, were everywhere depicted. Herds of human beings
that I feared, they looked so dull and brutal. The full meaning
of a terrible truth rushed upon me. Soon these men would be my
sovereigns--I their subject!

I had just spent a year in that German's native land, and I
remembered that I had seen their women doing the work of men in
the fields, husbands returning from their day's labor
empty-handed, and their wives toiling on behind bent under heavy
burdens, and as I thought on this, our ship bore him and me
towards the land that glories in having given birth to Lucretia
Mott. In the country where he had been reared, I had seen women
harnessed with beasts of burden, dragging laden wagons, and yet
our vessel carried him and me at each moment towards a safe
harbor, in a land that pays homage to the memory of Margaret
Fuller. Our ship sailed on, taking him from a land where he had
been taught to worship royalty, whatever its worth or crime;
where he had paid cringing submission to an arbitrary rule of
police; where he had been surrounded by the degrading effects of
the mightiest military system on the globe. The ship plowed on
and on through the waves, bringing him to a republic, not one
principle of which he comprehended.

And now we sail up New York bay. The day is bright, and a
softening haze hangs over all. Surely this is some vision-land.
Yes, it is indeed a vision-land, for it has never known the
presence of a royal line; against its oppressors it fought in no
mean rebellious spirit, but rose in revolution with its motto,
"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed," written on its brow to be known of all men. And I
think as we slowly sail up the bay on our vessel, Does that
deadened soul respond to what lies before him? Does there in his
heart rise the prayer, Oh, God! make me true to the duties about
to be laid upon me; make me worthy of being free? Yes, then, for
the first time I felt the full depth of the indignity offered to
my womanhood. I felt my enthusiasm for America wavering--love of
country dead. _My_ country!--I have no country.

Young men of Nebraska, I ask you to free your minds from
prejudice, to be just towards the demands of another