just such a movement as this. They go away, and carry to their villages and hamlets, the ideas they have gatherered here; and it is a cause for thankfulness to God that so many go away to repeat what they have heard. But we have wanted the documents to scatter among the people, as the Tract Society scatters its sheets. And now Mr. Higginson proposes that we have these essays. The first he proposes shall gather up all the Laws in any way relating to woman.

Now we have a great many women who laugh at the proposition for woman's filling public offices. They laugh at her sharing in the elective franchise. The women who do it, are mainly those around whom so much of sunshine has gathered, that they have not known that woman suffers from disabilities in these respects; and yet it is a sad fact. The law so weighs against those who sustain the position of wife and mother, that no married woman has a right to any of her earnings in any single state of all this Union. I was in New Jersey the other day and made this statement, when a lawyer, very politely, handed up a copy of their law, which he thought contradictory to what I had said; but it only secured to woman what property might fall to her before marriage. The product of her pen is not hers, because she has not acquired it under the definition of the word "acquired," which the law of New Jersey will allow to her.

It has been proved by sad experience, in too many instances, that a man may watch where his wife's earnings are accumulated and if he can lay his hands upon them,-unless by cunning she can keep them away from him, he can and does take them to pay the drunkard's bill, and to squander upon abandoned women I was told by a worthy physician within a month, how a wife kept her own earnings— and I want the women who don't wish to meddle with politics, to listen to me, and I want the men who ask us to trust them, to listen. In New York City there is a noble woman who is unfortunately the wife of a mean man,--and there are too many such. He lives to smoke cigars and drink rum, and revel in unworthy pleasures. He earns nothing. His wife, an energetic woman, keeps a millinery establishment, which she managed so well, as to enable her to keep on from year to year and accumulate in the Bank, a few hundred dollars. Her husband seduced the daughter of his neighbor, and when the fact

came to be known, the father prosecuted to recover money of the villain, for the world has not yet learned that money cannot pay for a deed so dastardly and devilish. By the Law this man had a right to the earnings of his wife, and he went to the Bank and drew the money that she, by her long toil had earned, and paid it for his lust! The Law allows this all over the Union; and while such statutes exist, it is important for women to know just what they are, and how they effect their interests. So I say in regard to the suggestion of Mr. Higginson that such a document be prepared, that it is exceedingly important, and that whoever gives his time to it, ought to be paid, for time is money; though I am happy to say, that on that topic, we have a worthy lawyer in Boston, who is doing it, and we have another noble brother, Wendell Phillips, who is pledged to pay him for his labor upon it.

Then the object of the other essay will be to examine and state the inequalities of education,-and I wish Mr. Higginson had added, of opportunity to learn from other sources than books alone. The right education from those, we are coming nearer to recognize, and the tendency of the age is to set that matter right; but while the admission is come to be made on all hands, I shall be glad when the other item is added also; when liberty will be given woman to learn not from books alone, but from the freedom to go out into the world's highway, and by actual conflict with life, learn the lessons that do not come from books.

But, consider the results that grow out of the fact, that when a woman has obtained an education such as Oberlin and McGrawville can give her, the world won't let her use it. Oberlin will let Antoinette Brown study Theology, but they won't let her preach. The young man gets his knowledge, and "the world is all before him where to choose," and Providence is his guide. I thank God that it is so. I thank God that our brothers never knew what their sisters have had to know by sad, stern experience.

I would, therefore, make an addition to the suggestion of Mr. Higginson on this topic, that the results also be embodied in the essay, of excluding woman from the liberty of using her knowledge in just the way she chooses, after she gets it. We are not asking liberty to

do wrong; no mortal has the right to do that. We are asking that woman be allowed to use her knowledge to do right; and not that when Antoinette Brown has studied Theology, the Orthodox world, with whom she believes, and believes, too, that the majority of men are going to Hell to burn eternally with Devils and damned spirits, should assume to say to her, that rather than that she, as a woman, should teach them the path to Heaven, they may all go to Hell together.

The fact is, that God gives us all the power to tell some truth, and we must tell it whether men give us the liberty or not, But we don't want our way hedged up, so that we shall be scourged, and hunted, and hissed when we do it. We don't want, when we are compelled by the dictates of our consciences to do it, to be met with sneers and told to go back where women have always been compelled to be, no matter whether God gave them talent to be there, or elsewhere.

Money is power, and woman has it not; and the reason is, because she is confined to three or four kinds of employments. I should, perhaps, not say that now. A few years ago, before this movement had "a local habitation and a name," woman had but two or three employments, but my heart has been gladdened to see how true, noble women, have come to the rescue of their sisters, making a pathway for them to other kinds of industry. But we are surrounded by a thousand difficulties, and among them the fact that society has not come to recognize the right of woman to do well, what she has the ability to do. Now we should learn to trust God, and know that when God has given powers to woman, she may use those powers; and when he made one woman a Sculptor, and another an Architect, we should know that he meant she should use what he gave her.

I remember a woman whom God made a Sculptor. He did not give her anything else, but he gave her the power to chisel the most beautiful creations out of marble. That was twenty-five years ago, before this question was openly agitated—but it was felt, for the thought comes ever before the deed; that was the era_of_thought, the feeling was beginning to move. This woman wrought out a bust of one of the citizens of the town. It was placed in a public position where it could be recognized. An artist saw it, and turned it

ion.

round and round in his hands. He saw and recognized the exquisite skill with which it was done, and as his comment upon it exclaimed : "O what a pity she is not a man !" He could not look up to the Heavenly Father, and trust Him who sees the end from the beginning. He could not know that when God had given her that power as a Sculptor, it was safe and best to trust her to use it; and the world has not yet learned it.

But growing out of these peculiar difficulties, which are the result of a circumscribed sphere, are sources of vice so fearful that the blood runs cold and curdling through my heart, only to think of it. When I was in New York I went to the Five Points, to Mr. Pease's charitable home, and he took me from room to room, where were gathered the women whom we call "abandoned." He showed me how by giving these women work, they earned their living and abandoned their vices. He said to me,-"Of all the women whom I have known in these miserable haunts, there is not one in a hundred who is not here simply because she could not earn her bread for herself by honorable labor. The compensation was so meager that she could not supply herself with bread." And I have been told by these women tales of horror that wrung tears from my eyes and heart. I have been told how they loathed those lives, by women who, when they spoke to me, seemed to me to have the very soul of fidelity and purity, told me that but for their children-" bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh," asking for bread at their hands-that but for supplying their wants, they would have starved a thousand times, rather than betake themselves to such lives. One woman told me her tale of wrong and outrage, and said that but for her children she would have dashed herself to atoms; like Rebecca, the Jewess, standing on the battlements, she would have thrown herself over and given back her spirit to her Father who gave it, rather than have gone down into that abyss of blackAnd she need not have done it, had the usages of society been such that she could have taken the power God had given her, of head and hand, and used them to get bread for herself and children. She might have been here with us. God had blessed her with intellect, had given her no common share; but she was a woman, and because she was a woman, society said to her, go stitch, or go into the kitchen,

ness.

or teach, whether you can get place and pay or not; and if you go beyond these, we will scourge you, we will call you an unsexed woman, and we will follow after you with the "world's dread laugh,” before which even brave men have not been able to stand.

A woman in the audience, with choking voice-Who was in fault that she could earn her bread by going into pollution?

LUCY STONE.-Who was in fault? The question answers itself! And now while the city and country is filled with vice, while women have so little time to cultivate the deathless part of their natures, but must grow unnourished and parched like the heath in the desert; is it not well to let the world know, is it not worth our while to gather the facts, and appropriate the money to spread them before the candid and thoughtful?

I do believe the people need light more than anything else, and if when the light is spread we do not act up to our privileges, greater will be our loss and condemnation.

But let us call for light and see that it be spread; and when you place in the hands of every man and woman facts, which are facts, showing the wrongs and results of the wrongs of woman, we shall find the hands of manly men and womanly women, coming up to assist us in this movement. We are not understood, because too many have taken pains to brand us with all sorts of epithets, to deter people from coming to hear; and because they have not come to hear, they have falsely regarded this movement as a mannish movement, and not one that tended to teach woman to take her God-given powers, and make the most and the best of them. Prejudice has been scattered like the leaves of Autumn every where against us. What we do, claim has been nowhere heard, and what we do not claim has been industriously stated as the object of the movement. I would suggest, therefore, that this Convention raise two hundred dollars to meet the expense of writing and publishing the proposed essays.

MRS. ROSE. I cannot avoid rising to endorse the ideas just presented, as to the great necessity to have some publications, so connected and concise as to combine all our legal grievances in one, all our educational deficiencies in another, and all our industrial disabilities in another; and have them published in large numbers to spread