Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/504

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History of Woman Suffrage.

bridge, to look after one miserable human being she had chanced to hear was immured there, she little thought of the career of benevolent effort and of high distinction as a philanthropist that was opening before her. She went only to give relief to a solitary sufferer. But the dejected, helpless and wretched condition in which she found the insane there, raised the inquiry in her mind whether it could be that the same class of unfortunates were treated in this wise elsewhere. Such an inquiry could not be suppressed in a heart like hers; it urged her on to further investigation. It led to new developments of the methods that philanthropists and scientists were advocating in France. She came at last to feel that she had a mission to that class of "the lost ones," and she has fulfilled it gloriously. She has been the angel of the Lord to the insane in almost all the States of the Union.

The Anti-Slavery cause in both England and America, owes as much to woman as to man. If in Great Britain the suppression of the African slave trade was commenced by men, the abolition of West India slavery was begun by women; and it is acknowledged that they did more than the men to accomplish the overthrow of that system of all imaginable wickedness, which, while it endured, stimulated the cupidity of the slave-trader, so that he prosecuted his accursed traffic as much as ever, notwithstanding the acts of the American Congress and the British Parliament. In our country the most efficient, untiring laborers in the antislavery cause, have from the beginning been women. Lydia Maria Child, a lady highly distinguished among the authors of America, was the first to publish a sizable book upon slavery. Its very title was a pregnant one, viz, "An Appeal in behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans." Its contents were of great and permanent value. The publication of that volume was to her a costly sacrifice of popularity as an author. At a very early period of the enterprise, Elizabeth M. Chandler published many essays and poems that will live forever. The bravery and persistence of Prudence Crandall in maintaining a school for colored girls in Connecticut, in the face of terrible persecution, is beyond praise. Maria Weston Chapman, since 1834, has been among the leaders of the anti-slavery host, directing their movements and stimulating them to effort. Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, Eliza Lee Follen, Abby Kelly, Mary Grew, are all worthy of mention — there is no end to the names of excellent, wise, courageous women who have contended nobly for the antislavery faith and practice. They have been traduced, reviled, persecuted, but nothing has deterred them from advocating the rights of humanity.

NEW YORK STATE TEMPERANCE CONVENTION,

Rochester, N. Y., April 20 And 21, 1852.

At ten o'clock a large audience assembled in Corinthian Hall. The morning session was composed entirely of women; more than five hundred being present. The meeting was called to order by