merging
their influence in a joint stock community with their brethren.
Where can we find an anti-slavery organization more potential,
and so dignified, as was the convention of American women? Is it
therefore surprising that the question has not been conclusively
settled by American abolitionists, that women ought to act
identically on the same platform and in the same society with
men; and that the practice, founded on this plan, still remains
measurably local, and, by many conforming to it, is deemed
experimental?

"In convening a World's Convention, no innovation upon the
general social usages was contemplated by our brethren in
England who called it. The convention was meant to be a
convention of men; and what was deficient of explicitness in the
first notice was amply made up in the reiteration of the call.
It was fully known before the appointment of delegates by the
American Anti-Slavery Society that the intention of the
committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was
such as is above explained. The views of the inviting party
being known, it was competent to the invited to accept or reject
the invitation, but not to modify its terms. The American
Society, however, in face of the invitation, with a knowledge of
the extreme sensitiveness of that portion of the British people
whom the Convention would deem it important to conciliate, to
any innovation upon established forms, and itself not united in
discarding the distinctions of sex, resolved to send female
delegates to the Convention, and thus, in effect, to appeal from
the Committee to the paramount authority of the Convention, and
with it to settle the American question.

"In exercising this authority we are to suppose, from the high
moral, intellectual, and philanthropic standing of its members,
the Convention, in adhering to the general usages of society,
meant to perpetuate no injustice; and we know, from their very
respectful attention to the rejected delegates, that they were
influenced by no want of courtesy--I am satisfied that they
acted according to their best impressions of duty, the carrying
out of which was their high aim; and that the Convention was not
the less a World's Convention because it did not embrace both
sexes as its members, or any reforms without the scope of its