main
business. Let the object of the meeting be unity of action and
expression in behalf of what we feel to be the highest right, our
highest idea of liberty.

THE PRESIDENT (Lucy Stone): Every good cause can afford to be
just. The lady from Wisconsin, who differs from some of us here,
says she is an Anti-Slavery woman. We ought to believe her. She
accepts the principles of the Woman's Rights movement, but she
does not like the way in which it has been carried on. We ought
to believe her. It is not, then, that she objects to the idea of
the equality of women and negroes, but because she does not wish
to have anything "tacked on" to the Loyal League, that to the
mass of people does not seem to belong there. She seems to me to
stand precisely in the position of those good people just at the
close of the war of the Revolution. The people then, as now, had
their hearts aching with the memory of their buried dead. They
had had years of war from which they had garnered out sorrows as
well as hopes; and when they came to establish a Union, they
found that one black, unmitigated curse of slavery rooted in the
soil. Some men said, "We can have no true Union where there is
not justice to the negro. The black man is a human being, like
us, with the same equal rights." They had given to the world the
Declaration of Independence, grand and brave and beautiful. They
said, "How can we form a true Union?" Some people representing
the class that Mrs. Hoyt represents, answered, "Let us have a
Union. We are weak; we have been beset for seven long years; do
not let us meddle with the negro question. What we are for is a
Union; let us have a Union at all hazards." There were earnest
men, men of talent, who could speak well and earnestly, and they
persuaded the others to silence. So they said nothing about
slavery, and let the wretched monster live.

To-day, over all our land, the unburied bones of our fathers and
sons and brothers tell the sad mistake that those men made when
long ago The babes we bear in anguish and carry in our arms are
not ours. The few rights that we have, have been wrung from the
Legislature by t they left this one great wrong in the land. They
could not accomplish good by passing over a wrong. If the right
of one single human being is