en as Lucretia Mott and her conscientious
co-laborers had made and delivered during the last twenty years.
The very next night, I heard Anna Dickinson in the largest hall
in New Haven, and before nearly 3,000 people, urge the women
present to consider their duty to this vast Republic in which we
dwell, and whose starry banner is as dear to women as to men. The
keynote of her bugle-call to the rescue was the idea of duty, and
that is the idea which inspires the women on this platform
to-day, while thousands of hearts throughout our Union respond,
with the same sentiment, to their appeals from the platform, the
pulpit, and the press.

Leading reformers of the world are telling us in clarion notes,
and in thunder tones, with the voice of warning or of appeal,
that woman owes service to the State, and that it is her duty to
strive earnestly that she may have that ballot in her own hand
which shall be at once her educator and protector, her sceptre
and her sword. But I have heard the Master's voice, speaking
through Lucy Stone and her co-workers, and speaking in my own
soul also, declaring that I, in common with every other woman in
this grand Republic, have a duty to the State that must not be
ignored. In the home, and in the church, most women acknowledge
they have duties--but as to the State they hesitate. Oh, if they
would but "gather into the stillness," as the Friends say, and
listen reverently to the voice within, I think they would often
hear the solemn utterance, "These ought ye to have done, and not
to leave the other undone." Every woman who has tried to do her
whole duty in the family, tried faithfully to make home a
foretaste of heaven, with its abounding peace and love, tried
with a mother's prayers, a mother's tears, a mother's unselfish,
self-denying love, to train her darlings for the skies--every
such woman deserves the gratitude of humanity, and that sweetest
of rewards to a mother's heart, viz; that "her children shall
rise up, and call her blessed;" while every woman who superadds
to this unselfish devotion to home and children, a lifelong
fidelity to the church in which she was reared, or has adopted;
every woman who has worshiped devoutly at the shrine her own soul
has accepted, following meekly in the footsteps of Him who we