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the Golden Age were restored, he answered, "A synod of good women shall decide."

Could his spirit look down upon us he would see those synods, of which he perhaps prophetically spoke, assembling all over the land, not to restore an age of semi-barbarism, but to hasten the advent of a new and far more golden era, when there will be no dangerous pilgrimage of years' duration to win. back the Holy Sepulchre, but a far more divine and sacred inheritance shall have been sought and found ; namely, freedom for woman to exercise every right, capacity, and power with which God has endowed her.

If there are any natural rights, then they belong to all by virtue of our humanity, and are not graduated by degrees of superiority. If the privilege of voting had been limited to those men who were strong in mind and morals, we should never have had a Governor's signature to "the black laws of Ohio."

It is perverse and cruel to raise the cry that we make war upon domestic life ; that we would destroy its natural order and attraction by allowing woman to mingle in the coarse and noisy scenes of political life. Is not the aid of man equally important in the family, and would his necessary duties in the home conflict with his duties as a citizen and a patriot ?

Man can not wrong and oppress woman without jeopardizing his own liberty. Cramped and crippled as she may be by inexorable law, she avenges herself, and decides his destiny. So long as woman is outlawed. man pays the penalty in ignorance, poverty, and suffering. Our interests are one, we rise or fall together.

Sisters of Indiana, accept my heartfelt sympathy in the work you have undertaken. It is well for the pioneers of a new country to call down God's blessing 0n their labors by an early claim to an equality of rights.

Yours, for justice to all,Esther Ayn Lukens.

Having never met the brave women who endured the first shower of ridicule in Indiana, we asked to be introduced to them in some brief pen-sketches, and in the following manner they present themselves :

 

REV. AMANDA M. WAY

may-be truthfully called the mother of "The Woman Suffrage Association" in Indiana organized in 1351, and took an active part in all the Conventions until she became a resident in Kansas in 1872. Miss Way was always an abolitionist, a prohibitionist, and an uncompromising suffragist — the great pioneer of all reforms. It is amusing to hear how many places she has been the first to fill ; yet she has done it all in such a quiet way that no one seemed to feel that she Was ever out of place. It was a common remark, "Amanda can do that, but she is not like other people." She was the first woman elected Grand Secretary of the "Indiana Order of Good Templars," in 1856 ; the first State lecturer and organizer ; the first in the world to be elected Grand Worthy Chief Templar ; the first one in her State to be a representative to the national lodge ; the first one admitted as a regular representative to the Grand Division, Sons of Temperance, and the first to be a licensed preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. What is better still, she continues in the work she began, gaining power and influence with the experience of years. An editor, speaking of her,