in the
winter months, have come to that office with the same pitiable
tale of poverty, desertion, and tyranny on the part of their
worthless and drunken husbands, who had gone off to California,
Kansas, or the West, taking away from their wives and children
every possible means of support, and leaving them the pauper
dependents on a public charity. Now, if this be not the denial of
Woman's Rights, I know not what is. Had we time, I might fill the
hour with a journal of statistics in painful illustration of
these facts. Now, I say, that a system of society which can
tolerate such a state of things, and, by sufferance even, allow
such men to wrench away the plain rights of their wives and
families, needs reforming.

But let us look a little higher in the social scale, to the
rights and claims of a class of women not so dependent--a class
who, by their education and culture, are competent to fill, or
who may be filling, the position of clerks, secretaries, or
assistant agents. How inadequate and insufficient, as a general
thing, is the compensation they receive!

There was associated with me in the agency and office to which I
have referred, as office-clerk and coadjutor, among others, an
intelligent and very worthy young woman, whose term of service
there has been coeval and coincident with the Association itself,
even through the whole seven years or more; and there she still
survives, through all the vicissitudes of the General Agency by
death or otherwise, with a fidelity of service worthy of more
liberal compensation; for she receives, even now, for an amount
of service equal to that of any other in the office, only about
one-third the salary paid to a male occupant of the same sphere!

Look next at the professional sphere of women, properly so
called; and who shall deny her right and claim to that position?
A young brother clergyman came to my office one day, wanting his
pulpit supplied; and, in the course of conversation, asked very
earnestly, "How would it do to invite a woman-preacher into my
pulpit?" "Do!" said I (giving him the names of Mrs. Dall, Dr.
Hunt, etc., as the most accessible) "of course it'll do." And all
I have to say is, if I ever resume again the charge of a pulpit
myself, and either of those preachers want an exc