feelings of disgust and contempt for the author, and wonder at the
ignorance of any one who is gullible enough to believe them.

In August she received a letter from Lucy Stone, asking if she had been
correctly reported by the papers as saying that "the suffragists would
advocate any party which would declare for woman suffrage," to which
she replied:

I answer "yes," save that I used the pronoun "I" instead of the
word "suffragists." I spoke for myself alone, because I know many
of our women are so much more intensely Republican or Democratic,
Hard-Money or Green-back, Prohibition or License, than they are
"Equal Rights for All," that now, as in the past, they will hold
the question of woman's enfranchisement in abeyance, while they
give their money and their energies to secure the success of one or
another of the contending parties, even though it wholly ignore
their just claim to a voice in the government. It is not that I
have no opinions or preferences on the many grave questions which
distract and divide the parties; but it is that, in my judgment,
the right of self-government for one-half the people is of far more
vital consequence to the nation than any or all other questions.

This has been my position ever since the abolition of slavery, by
which the black race were raised from chattels to citizens, and
invested also with civil rights equally with the cultured,
tax-paying, white women of the country. Have you forgotten the cry
"This is the negro's hour," which came back to us in 1866, when we
urged the Abolitionists to make common cause with us and demand
suffrage _as a right_ for all United States citizens, instead of
asking it simply as an _expediency_ for only another class of men?
Do you not remember, too how the taunt "false to the negro" was
flung into the face of every one of us who insisted that it was
"humanity's hour," and that to talk of "freedom without the ballot"
was no less "mockery" to woman than to the negro?

If, in those most trying reconstruction years, I could not
subordinate the fundamental principle of "Equal Rights for All" to
Republican party necessity for negro suffrage--if, in that fearful
national emergency, I would not sacrifice the greater to the
less--I surely can not and will not today hold any of the far less
important party questions paramoun