ike heavy blows for freedom and equality such as we shall
not have for a long time to come. I am ready just as soon as the armies
can be marshaled and equipped." But later she wrote:

It is being forced upon me that nature orders me to stay quietly at
home this winter and it may be that it is to enable me to get a
greater literary culture than I possibly could, amidst the hurry
and bustle of continual meetings. Somehow I can not philosophize
away a shrinking from going into active work. I can not get up a
particle of enthusiasm or faith in the success, either financial or
spiritual, of another series of conventions. For the past five
years I have gone through this routine and something within me
keeps praying to be spared from more of it. There has been such a
surfeit of lecturing, the people are tired of it. Then I never was
so poor in purse and I fear to end another campaign with a heavy
debt to still further encroach upon my small savings. I can not
bear to make myself dependent upon relatives for the food I eat and
the clothes I wear; I never have done it and hope I may never have
to. Perhaps I may feel a renewed faith in myself and my work but
the past years have brought me so much isolation and spiritual
loneliness, although in the midst of crowds, that I confess to a
longing to stay for awhile among my own people.

The commands of the physician were imperative that she should avoid all
fatigue and nervous excitement, but her pen was not idle, and the time
which she hoped to devote to the reading of many books was occupied in
sending out letters, petitions, appeals and the various documents
necessary to keep the work going. In answer to an invitation from the
Friends of Human Progress she wrote:

To be esteemed worthy to speak for woman, for the slave, for
humanity, is ever grateful to me, and I regret that I can not be
with you at your annual gathering to get for myself a fresh
baptism, a new and deeper faith. I would exhort all women to be
discontented with their present condition and to assert their
individuality of thought, word and action by the energetic doing of
noble deeds. Idle wishes, vain repinings, loud-sounding
declamations never can bring freedom to any human soul. What woman
most needs is a true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect
which shall scorn to eat the bread of dependenc