Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/418

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History of Woman Suffrage.

can not describe the daily, hourly, ceaseless torture, endured by the heart that is constantly trampled under the foot of arbitrary power. This is a part of the horrors of slavery which, I believe, no one has ever attempted to delineate, I wonder not at it; it mocks all power of language. Who can describe the anguish of that mind which feels itself impaled upon the iron of arbitrary power — its living, writhing, helpless victim! every human susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and bleeding — always feeling the death weapon in its heart, and yet not so deep as to kill that humanity which is made the curse of its existence?

No one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community can have any idea of its abominations. It is a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Blessed be God, the angel of truth has descended, and rolled away the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre, and sits upon it. The abominations so long hidden are now brought forth before all Israel and the sun. Yes, the angel of truth sits upon this stone, and it can never be rolled back again.

There is a spirit abroad in this country which will not consent to barter principle for an unholy peace — a spirit which will not hide God's eternal principles of right and wrong, but will stand erect in the storm of human passion, prejudice, and interest, holding forth the light of truth in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation; a spirit which will never slumber nor sleep till man ceases to hold dominion over his fellow-creatures, and the trump of universal liberty rings in every forest, and is re-echoed by every mountain and rock.

'She who spoke in tones like these never lost one of her purely feminine qualities. Graceful, gentle, retiring, taking upon herself the lowliest duties as if she had been born to them, this woman, who stood up that her light might shine on all, and reveal to them the terrible atrocities of slavery, was like Jeremy Taylor's taper, which cast ever a modest shadow round itself. She had a very lofty idea of what a woman should be. Whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights. I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female." 'Sure I am that woman is not to be, as she has been, a mere "second-hand agent" in the regeneration of a fallen world, but the acknowledged equal and co-worker with man in this glorious work. . . . . Just in proportion as her moral and intellectual capacities become enlarged, she will rise higher and higher in the scroll of creation, until she reaches that elevation prepared for her by her Maker, and upon whose summit she was originally stationed, only "a little lower than the angels.'"

In the darkest hours of that fearful conflict with slavery in which she was engaged, when its advocates were everywhere met with