so clear and advanced on the question, or questions, of “Woman's Rights.” After a lapse of nearly forty years, during which time those rights have taken rapid strides toward recognition and adjustment, there can be found nothing in her statement of woman's demands and needs which is behind the most advanced ideas of the present day. And I very much doubt whether there can be found half a dozen other women who, at so early a stage of this progressive movement, put themselves so clearly and daringly on record as to their convictions on this subject as did Harriet Martineau.
“I declare,” she says, on the 151st page of the second volume of her “Society in America,” “that whatever obedience I yield to the laws of the society in which I live is a matter between, not the community and myself, but my judgment and my will. Any punishment inflicted on me for a breach of those laws I should regard as so much gratuitous injury, for to those laws I have never actually or virtually assented. I know there
