or this individual woman they
throng the hall. Mrs. Dahlgren abhors politics: a woman in Congress, a
woman in the committee-room,--what can be more objectionable? But I
observe that when Mrs. Dahlgren wishes to obtain more profit by her
husband's inventions all objections vanish: she can appeal to Congressmen,
she can address committees, she can, I hope, prevail. The individual ranks
first in our sympathy: we do not wait to take the census of the "class."
Make way for the individual, whether it be Mrs. Dahlgren pleading for the
rights of property, or Lucy Stone pleading for the rights of the mother to
her child.

DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES

After one of the early defeats in the War of the Rebellion, the commander
of a Massachusetts regiment wrote home to his father: "I wish people would
not write us so many letters of condolence. Our defeat seemed to trouble
them much more than it troubles us. Did people suppose there were to be no
ups and downs? We expect to lose plenty of battles, but we have enlisted
for the war."

It is just so with every successful reform. While enemies and half-friends
are proclaiming its defeats, those who advocate it are rejoicing that they
have at last got an army into the field to be defeated. Unless this war is
to be an exception to all others, even the fact of having joined battle is
a great deal. It is the first step. Defeat first; a good many defeats, if
you please: victory by and by.

William Wilberforce, writing to a friend in the year 1817, said, "I
continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward by
Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority of
the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so far
from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a
recommendation." In 1832 the reform bill was passed.

In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave trade, Colonel Tarleton, who
boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to
Wilberforce and others, said, "The inspiration began on that side of the
house;" then turning round, "The revolution has reached to this also, and
reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy." The first vote in the
House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by
Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163: majority
against the measure, 75. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished, and in 1834
slavery in the British colonies