of our cause have said that for these there is no profession but marriage. If they are not literary, artistic, or philanthropic, what can they do ? They arc held by a cable, made up of home influence, of fashion, and of perverted Scripture, which binds them down to an insipid existence. Hence, they suppress all desire for a fuller, larger life ; they smile graciously upon their fetters; they profess to be the happiest of all happy women, and thus they glide along through the thoroughfares of society with a lying tongue and an aching heart.
I wish these had enough vitality of soul and enough energy of character to rise superior to the circumstances around them, and make some approach to their own ideal. I know this is asking them to martyrize themselves. But could they see the beauty and the glory that will invest the future woman, when she shall have her proper place among the children of the Father; when she shall infuse her love, her moral perceptions, her sense of justice, into the ethics and governments of the earth; when she shall be united to man in a Divine harmony, and her children shall go forth to bless all coming generations, they would regard martyrdom but dust in the balance compared with such blessing. And when the world shall see the moral grandeur, the sublime position of a race redeemed by the sanctifying influences of this Divine harmony, it will weave for them a brighter chaplet than it has ever woven for any of its martyrs who have suffered at the stake. (Loud applause).
Rev. Beriah Green, of Whitesboro', N. Y., was next introduced, and said:
It is not, I suppose, at all the design of this platform in any way to abolish what the grammarians call "the distinction of sex"; and when we speak of "woman's rights," we admit, in the very language which is thus employed, that she is a "woman"—that that is appropriately her character that under this name she is fitly described. Now, a comprehensive description of all the rights which any member of the human family, whoever and whatever and wherever he may be, is entitled to challenge and maintain, we have in the brief and simple expression, the right to be himself; the right to be true to the nature which he has inherited; the right to the free and full development of the powers with which he is endowed; the right to lay out those resources of which he is constructed happily, effectively, properly ; the right to rise to the highest position in excellence and in blessedness to which his capacities and powers may elevate him. This is a comprehensive description of man's rights, a comprehensive description of woman's rights, and a comprehensive description of human rights, under every form and phase of application of which human rights may be supposed capable.
Now, I regard it as a repulsive feature of the age, that one sex should feel itself constrained to come forward and defend itself from the other sex; to demand a redress of the wrongs to which it may be exposed, and a vindication of the rights to which it may be entitled; for, look you! most obviously and clearly, the relation between the sexes is naturally most intimate. The one lives in and through the other. They do not make two distinct classes, most obviously and certainly. They do not in nature; they do not according to the Divine arrangement; and it always seems to me to be most absurd, and in the highest degree ungrateful, to present the subject with which we are now occupied, under any such aspect. Mankind are divided, doubtless—divided now by accident, and now by arrangement—into different classes; but to make the