we can hardly blame any one
for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for
an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more
readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in
advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus
ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we
can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one
hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work in hospitals and three
to the Woman Suffrage movement, but considering the tone of the three
pages, the advocates of the measure should be thankful she gave no
more.

Mrs. Swisshelm's contempt is only surpassed by Mrs. Hale's "Jeremiad"
over the infidelity of the noble leader of our movement. For a woman
so thoroughly politic and time-serving, who, unlike the great master
she professed to follow, never identified herself with one of the
unpopular reforms of her day, whose pen never by any chance slipped
outside the prescribed literary line of safety, to cheer the martyrs
to truth in her own generation; lamentations from such a source over
Lucretia Mott, are presumptuous and profane. If such a life of
self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of humanity; such
courage to stand alone, to do and say the right,'mid persecution,
violence and mobs; such charity and faithfulness in every relation of
life, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend; such calm
declining years and peaceful death could all be realized without a
belief in the creed of Sarah Josepha Hale; the philosophical
conclusion is that there may be some Divine light and love outside of
Mrs. Hale's horizon; that her shibboleth may after all not be the true
measure for the highest Christian graces.

Sarah J. Hale, shuddering over the graves of such women as Harriet
Martineau, Frances Wright, Mary Wollstonecroft, George Sand, George
Eliot and Lucretia Mott, might furnish a subject for an artist to
represent as "bigotry weeping over the triumphs of truth."

Nevertheless, as Mrs. Hale lived in Pennsylvania forty years, the
women of that State may rejoice in the fact that in her great work,
"Woman's Record," she has given "Sketches of all the distinguished
women from the Creation to A.D. 1868"; a labor for which our sex owe
her a debt of gratitude. To exhume nearly seventeen hundred women from
oblivion, classify them, and set forth their distinguished traits of
char