the duties it demands of its citizens? But I want you to hold your reply in abeyance, till I give you one bit more of history. A ship at sea crossing on the Atlantic between Europe and America. Of two persons on this vessel I wish to speak to you. Of one I have already told you much; I need but add that my two years spent in Europe,[1]previous to my return to America for a few months last winter, had not made me less American, less a lover of republicanism. And now this ship, baffling the February storm, was sweeping nearer the land where the people reign. My heart beat high as I thought it was in my native country where women were free, more honored than in any nation in the world. As I stood on the deck, the strong sea-wind blowing wildly about me, and the ocean bearing on its heart-wave mountains, visions of the grandeur of the nation lying off beyond the western horizon, rose before me. And it was a proud heart that cried—"My Country!"
And the other person I want to speak of? It is a man, a German, coming to the United States to escape military service in Prussia. He came in the steerage; was poor and ignorant. He could speak no English, not one word of your language and mine. His fellows were all Irish, so I offered to be an interpreter for him. I visited the steerage quarters, and returned with a heavy heart. Such brutal faces as I saw! Ignorance, cruelty, subserviency, were everywhere depicted. Herds of human beings that I feared, they looked so dull and brutal. The full meaning of a terrible truth rushed upon me. Soon these men would be my sovereigns—I their subject!
I had just spent a year in that German's native land, and I remembered that I had seen their women doing the work of men in the fields, husbands returning from their day's labor empty-handed, and their wives toiling on behind bent under heavy burdens, and as I thought on this, our ship bore him and me towards the land that glories in having given birth to Lucretia Mott. In the country where he had been reared, I had seen women harnessed with beasts of burden, dragging laden wagons, and yet our vessel carried him and me at each moment towards a safe harbor, in a land that pays homage to the memory of Margaret Fuller. Our ship sailed on, taking him from a land where he had been taught to worship royalty, whatever its worth or crime; where he had paid cringing submission to an arbitrary rule of police; where he had been surrounded by the degrading effects of the mightiest military system on the globe. The ship plowed on and on through the waves, bringing him to a republic, not one principle of which he comprehended.
And now we sail up New York bay. The day is bright, and a softening haze hangs over all. Surely this is some vision-land. Yes, it is indeed a vision-land, for it has never known the presence of a royal line; against its oppressors it fought in no mean rebellious spirit, but rose in revolution with its motto, "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," written on its brow to be known of all men. And I
- ↑ Miss Stanton, having studied astronomy with Professor Maria Mitchell, went to Europe to take a degree in Mathematics from the College of France; but before completing her course, she shared the fate of too many of our American girls; she expatriated herself by marrying a foreigner.
