to abolish slavery all over the world, it is the basis of the present Convention to seek success by peaceable, moral, and intellectual means alone, to the utter exclusion of armed violence. We are engaged in a strife not of strength, but of argument. Our warfare is not military; it is Christian. We wield not the weapons of destruction or injury to our adversaries. We rely entirely on reason and persuasion common to both sexes, and on the emotions of benevolence and charity, which are more lovely and permanent amongst women than amongst men.
In the Church to which I belong the female sex are devoted by as strict rules and with as much, if not more, unceasing austerity to the performance (and that to the exclusion of all worldly or temporal joys and pleasures) of all works of humanity, of education, of benevolence, and of charity, in all its holy and sacred branches, as the men. The great work in which we are now engaged embraces all these charitable categories; and the women have the same duties, and should, therefore, enjoy the same rights with men in the performance of their duties.
I have a consciousness that I have not done my duty in not sooner urging these considerations on the Convention. My excuse is that I was unavoidably absent during the discussion on the subject.
I have the honor to be, very respectfully, madam,
Your obedient servant,
Daniel O'Connell.
Lucretia Mott.
The following earnest and friendly letter from William Howitt, was highly prized by Mrs. Mott:
London, June 27, 1840.
Dear Friend:—....I regret that I was prevented from making a part of the Convention, as nothing should have hindered me from stating there in the plainest terms my opinion of the real grounds on which you were rejected. It is a pity that you were excluded on the plea of being women; but it is disgusting that under that plea you were actually excluded as heretics. That is the real ground, and it ought to have been at once proclaimed and exposed by the liberal members of the Convention; but I believe they were not aware of the fact. I heard of the circumstance of your exclusion at a distance, and immediately said: "Excluded on the ground that they are women?" No, that is not the real cause; there is something behind. And what are these female delegates? Are they orthodox in religion? The answer was "No, they are considered to be of the Hicksite party of Friends." My reply was, "That is enough; there lies the real cause, and there needs no other. The influential Friends in the Convention would never for a moment tolerate their presence there if they could prevent it. They hate them because they have dared to call in question their sectarian dogmas and assumed authority; and they have taken care to brand them in the eyes of the Calvinistic Dissenters, who form another large and influential portion of the Convention, as Unitarians; in their eyes the most odious of heretics."
But what a miserable spectacle is this! The "World's Convention" converting itself into the fag-end of the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends! That Convention met from various countries and climates to consider how it shall best advance the sacred cause of humanity; of the freedom of the race, independent of caste or color, immediately falls the victim of bigotry; and one of its first acts is to establish a caste of sectarian opinion, and to introduce color into the very soul! Had I not seen of late years a good deal of the spirit which now rules the Society of Friends, my surprise would have been unbounded at seeing them argue for the exclusion of women from a public assembly, as women. But nothing which they do now surprises me. They have in this case to gratify their wretched spirit of intolerance, at once abandoned one of the most noble and most philosophical of the established principles of their own Society.
That Society claims, and claims justly, to be the first Christian party which has recognized the great Christian doctrine that there is no sex in souls; that male and female are one in Christ Jesus. There were Fox and Penn and the first giants of the Society who dared in the face of the world's prejudices to place woman in her first rank; to recognize and maintain her moral and intellectual equality. It was this Society which thus gave to woman her inalienable rights, her true liberty; which restored to her the exercise of mind, and the capacity to exhibit before her assumed ancient lord and master, the highest qualities of the human heart and understanding; discretion, sound counsel, sure sagacity, mingled with feminine delicacy, and that beautiful innate modesty which avails more to restrain its possessor within the bounds of prudence and usefulness than all the laws of corrupt society. It was this Society which, at once fearless in its confidence in woman's goodness and sense of propriety, gave its female portion its own meetings of discipline, meetings of civil discussion and transaction of actual and various business. It was this Society which did more; which permitted its women in the face of a great apostolic injunction to stand forth in its churches and preach the Gospel. It has, in fact, sent them out armed with the authority of its certificates to the very ends of the earth to preach in public; to visit and persuade in private.
And what has been the consequence? Have the women put their faith And philosophy to shame? Have they disgraced themselves or the Society which has confided in them? Have they proved by their follies, their extravagances, their unwomanly boldness and want of a just sense of decorum that these great men were wrong? On the contrary, I will venture to say, and I have seen something of all classes, that there is not in the whole civilized world a body of women to be found of the same numbers, who exhibit more modesty of manner and delicacy of mind than the ladies of the Society of Friends; and few who equal them in sound sense and dignity of character. There can be no question that the recognition of the moral and intellectual equality of the most lovely and interesting portion of our Society has tended, and that very materially, to raise them greatly in value as wives, as bosom friends and domestic counselors, whose inestimable worth is only discovered in times of trial and perplexity.
And here have gone the little men of the present day, and have knocked down in the face of the world all that their ancestors, in this respect, had built up! If they are at all consistent they must carry out their new principle and sweep it through the ancient constitution of their own Society. They must at once put down meetings of discipline among their women; they must call home such as are in distant countries, or are traversing this, preaching and visiting families. There must be no appointments of women to meet committees of men to deliberate on matters of great importance to the Society. But the fact is, my dear friend, that bigotry is never consistent except that is always narrow, always ungracious, and always under plea of uniting God's people, scattering them one from another, and rendering them weak as water.
I want to know what religious opinions have to do with a "World's Convention." Did you meet to settle doctrines, or to conspire against slavery? Many an august council has attempted to settle doctrines, and in vain; and you had before you a subject so vast, so pressing, so momentous, that in presence of its sublimity, any petty jealousy and fancied idea of superiority ought to have fallen as dust from the boughs of a cedar. You as delegates, had to meet this awful fact in the face, and to consider how it should be grappled with; how the united power of civilized nations should be brought to bear upon it! The fact that after nearly a century of gradually growing and accumulating efforts to put down slavery and the slave trade, little has been done; that there are now more slaves in the world than ever, and that the slave trade is far more extensive and monstrous than it was when Clarkson raised his voice against its extinction; that is a fact which, if the men who now take the lead in warring on the evil were truly great men, it would silence in them every other feeling than that of its enormity, and the godlike resolve that all hands and all hearts should be raised before Heaven and united in its spirit to chase this spreading villainy from the earth speedily and forever. But men, however benevolent, can not be great men if they are bigots. Bigots are like the peasants who build their cabins in the mighty palaces of the ancient Cæsars. The Cæsars who raised the past fabrics are gone, and the power in which they raised them is gone with them. Poor and little men raise their huts within those august palace walls, and fancy themselves the inhabitants of the palaces themselves. So in the mighty fane of Christianity, bigots and sectarians are continually rearing their
