measles; make his own clothes in scanty vacations; play the church organ, teach a Sundayschool class, or take his mother's place when she fell ill. Nor was the lack of money any serious difficulty to the clever young man. While many

a young girl was doing the work of a common servant in order to earn the sixty dollars necessary to pay her way through Mount Holyoke, Harvard College was offering not less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year in cash premiums for study; and, as in the Chinese family, mothers and sisters at home pledged themselves for the support of the brilliant boy, who was to be of the "literati" and reflect honor on the household.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century it was perfectly apparent that not until women ceased to be the pensioners of men; not until they could command their own money and limit their duties in the household; not until endowments and scholarships for their use were as abundant and as generously provided as for men, could any considerable body of women attain an unquestioned intellectual status. Nor could their attainments be justly appraised until the phantom of the learned woman had vanished. So long as men were reluctant to let their womenkind take their chances in education, as they have to do in matrimony; so long as they wavered between the

fear that young men will be inoculated with the bacillus femininus, and the theory that women themselves will become immune to it, women distrusted their own powers, and the legitimacy of their commission. They have yet to learn to be themselves, and to follow the inner vision wherever it may lead.

CHAPTER XII

WOMEN INSURGENTS

"In times like these every soul should do the work of a fullgrown man. When I pass the gate of the Celestials and good Peter asks me where I wish to sit, I will say: Anywhere so that I am neither a negro nor a woman. Confer on me, Great Angel, the glory of white manhood, so that henceforth I may feel unlimited freedom.'"-Letter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony.

"It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust."-Letter of Susan B. Anthony to her brother.

"Whatever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights.”— ANGELINA GRIMKÉ Weld.

DOUBTLESS nothing more surprised the orthodoxy and the social conventions of American society in the earlier half of the Nineteenth Century than the way in which a few hundred women broke loose, so to speak; coming out from the domesticated masses to demand all sorts of unprecedented rights, to champion champion unpopular causes, to enter activities where their labors rather than their voices had hitherto been ac

ceptable. And yet the modern student of history sees in this ebullition simply the logical consequences of the political and intellectual ferment of the later Eighteenth Century, which left as its principal residuum the doctrine of equal rights and opportunities for all classes of men.

When once the doctrine had been implanted it was inevitable that reasoning minds should soon begin to ask: Why not for women, too? Acute and just-thinking men could not but see the inconsistencies involved in a career like that of Mercy Warren, whose satirical poems and dramas were of as great service to the revolutionary cause as that contributed by many a fighting man; but whose status remained that of an inferior and childish being:

"Noble and understanding as this lady of '76 was in fact, and recognized by the men of her day to be, in theory she was anything but that. She was a person of inferior mind, unable to master the strong meat of education, unfit to be trusted with the guardianship of her property or her children, lest both suffer, not to be allowed free speech in public lest her tongue run away with her and disorder and loose doctrines be encouraged, not to be allowed to mix in the gatherings or deliberations of men lest her household, her manners, and public morals suffer. The greatest men of New England are on record on these points, and the Church and the Law upheld them."

Tarbell, American Magazine, vol. 69, p. 14.

The appreciation of human rights engendered by the struggle for independence was quickened by the teachings and social experiments of Robert Owen, and by the socialistic propaganda of the early forties. In the wake of the extraordinary prosperity following the panic of 1837, and as a result of all these economic and humanitarian theorizings, two movements arose which were destined to precipitate a concrete feminine protest. Temperance and the abolition of slavery were calculated by their very nature to appeal to the highly developed sympathies of womenkind; and, as moral issues, might naturally have been deemed suitable to their sphere in life. The instinctive interest of women was not in social or religious theory; rather, there were many like Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, who wrote of herself:

"The highest evidence of a sound faith being the practical life of a Christian, I have felt a far greater interest in the moral movements of our age than in any theological discussion."

Inspired, therefore, by the humaner aspects of religion, women organized temperance meetings, raising the money and doing the largest part of the work, only to be excluded not merely from the rostrum, but even from the debates on the floor. The spectacle of Antoinette Brown, the ac