an will be less manly or woman less womanly when
they meet on terms of equality before the law.

On the other hand, I do not see that the exercise of the ballot by woman
will prove a remedy for all the evils of which she justly complains. It
is her right as truly as mine, and when she asks for it, it is something
less than manhood to withhold it. But, unsupported by a more practical
education, higher aims, and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of
life and duty, it is not likely to prove a blessing in her hands any more
than in man's.

With great respect and hearty sympathy, I am very truly thy friend.

ITALIAN UNITY

AMESBURY, MASS., 1st Mo., 4th, 1871.

Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration
of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy.

IT would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on
the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation
of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.

For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular
movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the
deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries. I
looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their
ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings. Had I been a Catholic instead of a
Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from
Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical,
desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty
which I prized so highly for myself.

I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited
its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic
under Mazzini and Garibaldi. From that hour it was doomed, and the
expiation of its monstrous crime is still going on. My sympathies are
with Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish and
sustain a republic in France, but I confess that the investment of Paris
by King William seems to me the logical sequence of the bombardment of
Rome by Oudinot. And is it not a significant fact that the terrible
chassepot, which made its first bloody experiment upon the halfarmed
Italian patriots without the walls of Rome, has failed in the hands of
French republicans against the inferior needle-gun of Prussia? It was
said of a fierce actor