a most righteous cause should
be maintained with any save the most untainted motives and the most
unbending rectitude, and who have failed even yet to read in your policy
the full _desire_ to accomplish that end of universal emancipation
whereto Providence is visibly directing the course of events.
Somewhat, also, may be forgiven to those who have been misled by the
misrepresentations of a portion of our press, and offended by the
inimical spirit of your own. But, Madam, although many lips have been
closed which ought to have spoken to you words of blessing, though the
voice of England which has reached you has lacked that full tone of
heartfelt sympathy you had justly anticipated, yet believe not that
our nation is truly alienated from yours, or apostate to the great
principles of freedom which were once our glory. The heart of England is
sound at the core: Slavery is now and ever an abomination in our eyes;
nor has the dastard proposition to recognize the Confederate States
failed to call forth indignant rejection, and that even with peculiar
earnestness from those suffering operatives whose relief such a measure
might have secured. It is to assure you of this, to vindicate ourselves
from the shame of turning back in the hour of trial,--most foreign to
our common Saxon race,--that we, the Women of England, offer you this
response.

"We do not less abhor Slavery now than when your eloquent words called
out an echo of feeling throughout Europe, such as no other appeal for
the wronged or the miserable ever produced. We abhor Slavery, judging it
simply as _human beings_, and because of all the agonies and tortures it
has occasioned. We abhor it, judging it especially as _women_, because
of all the unspeakable wrongs, the hideous degradation, it has inflicted
on our sex. But we abhor it not only because of these its results, nor
with a hatred which would be withdrawn, were they disputable now or
remediable hereafter. We abhor Slavery for itself, and for its own
enormous iniquity,--even the robbing from a human being of that freedom
which it was the supreme gift of Omnipotence to bestow. We hold, that,
were it in the power of the slaveholder to make his slaves absolutely
happy, Slavery would not less be an injustice and a crime. Happiness is
not to be measured against freedom, else would God have left us brutes,
not men, and spared us all the sorrows of struggling humanity. And
whereas it has been argued that the negro is o