years ago, and now that reform has drawn into its vortex all the living spirits in the land, and has created an agitation of the public mind that will never be quelled until Slavery is buried out of sight forever. If the women of New York will act up to the noble sentiments that have been expressed in the addresses and letters written by women to this Convention, great and glorious results must follow. And there are especial reasons why women should be earnest in this cause. Their sex, though not so much addicted as ours to the use of intoxicating drinks, suffers more from the effects of the evil. To them it is the destruction of all domestic peace, the wreck of all conjugal and maternal hopes; it is ignorance, poverty, misery, for themselves and children. My own attention was first called to this reform by the sufferings of women. (Mr. May here related several touching anecdotes of most estimable women he had known, devoted wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, who had been utterly despoiled of all earthly comfort by the intemperance of those they loved).
At one time I thought this evil might be repressed by man alone; but I have learned that humanity is dual. God made man male and female. The sexes are equally concerned in the welfare of the race. What God has joined together must not be put asunder. Women are constituent parts of the State and the Church, as well as of the home; and their influence is as indispensable to the well-being of the former as the latter. A State or Church that excludes woman from its councils, is like a family without a mother, in a condition of half orphanage.
In the days of our Revolution women made as many sacrifices and endured as great sufferings for independence, as did the men. It is most ungrateful when we are speaking of that event, and the actors in it, not to make mention of our Revolutionary Mothers. In the French Revolution women were conspicuous actors. If Madame Roland and her coadjutors had been allowed to sway the public councils, the results would have been far happier for France.
In moral revolutions women have ever signalized themselves. It was a woman, Elizabeth Fry, who in England commenced the reform in the discipline of prisons, and prosecuted it in person for years, until she had proven her plans feasible, and inspired others with a faith like her own. It was Dorothea Dix (a very delicately organized woman), who first in this country recognized the claims and acknowledged the rights of the insane. She found these poor victims of man's ignorance everywhere suffering terrible hardships. They were dreaded by all, and abhorred by many who had charge of them, and believed to be incapable of suffering as sane people suffer, and to be beyond the reach of those kindly influences which more than all others control those who are in their right minds. Miss Dix penetrated their cheerless, dark, damp abodes. She brought to light the wrongs that were inflicted upon them. She exposed the folly of the fears which were entertained of them. She showed by her own courageous experiments that even furious maniacs could be controlled by the spirit of Christian love. The asylums in many of our States to-day are noble monuments to the inestimable value of her services.
When Miss Dix first visited the insane department of the jail in Cam-
