added by culture. We take from the metal before casting
as much as we restore by polish afterwards, and thus we
curse and stultify both sexes.

The law and religion of man can be no better than man
himself. If religion, law, justice and social order are to
improve, man must first be improved. Religion and law are
effects, not causes. They are fruits, not the tree--the
products of the human mind. If these are to be improved,
mankind must first be improved. This will be impossible
until freedom and culture shall become the inalienable
rights of woman. It would be a thousand times better, if
either must be a slave to the other, that man should be a
slave to woman. The History of Woman Suffrage, on which you
are engaged, if the second volume shall prove equal to the
first, will be the richest legacy this age will bequeath to
the future. It is a revelation from God, in which, if men
believe, they shall be saved. Religion itself, without this
great salvation, will continue to remain little else than "a
wretched record of inspired crime" against woman. Woman must
be free! Protection as an underling from man, savage or
civilized, she in reality never had and never will have.
Protection she does not want. What she needs is equal
rights, when she can protect herself--rights of person,
rights of labor, rights of property, rights of culture,
rights of leisure, rights to participate in the making and
administering of the laws. Give her equality in exchange for
protection; give her her earnings in exchange for support;
give her justice in exchange for charity. Let man trust
woman as woman trusts man, with entire liberty of action,
and she will show the world that liberty is her highest
good.

In conclusion, let me confess that I read your first volume
with a feeling of inexpressible shame and mortification for
my sex.

Yours faithfully,
A.J. GROVER.

[Illustration: Elizabeth Boynton Harbert]

Mrs. Boynton Harbert, to whom we are indebted for this chapter, has
from girlhood been an enthusiastic advocate of the ri