Sitting in the hotel that evening and wanting something to read, we asked the waiter for the daily papers.  As there was no public table or drawing room for guests, but each party had its own apartment, we needed a little change from the society of each other.  Having been, as it were, shut from the outside world for eighteen days, we had some curiosity to see whether our planet was still revolving from west to east.  At the mention of papers in the plural number, the attendant gave us a look of surprise, and said he would get “it.”  He returned saying that the gentleman in No. 4 had “it,” but he would be through in fifteen minutes.  Accordingly, at the end of that time, he brought the newspaper, and, after we had had it the same length of time, he came to take it to another party.  At our lodging house in London, a paper was left for half an hour each morning, and then it was taken to the next house, thus serving several families of readers.

The next day brought us to London.  When I first entered our lodging house in Queen Street, I thought it the gloomiest abode I had ever seen.  The arrival of a delegation of ladies, the next day, from Boston and Philadelphia, changed the atmosphere of the establishment, and filled me with delightful anticipations of some new and charming acquaintances, which I fully realized in meeting Emily Winslow, Abby Southwick, Elizabeth Neal, Mary Grew, Abby Kimber, Sarah Pugh, and Lucretia Mott.  There had been a split in the American anti-slavery ranks, and delegates came from both branches, and, as they were equally represented at our lodgings, I became familiar with the whole controversy.  The potent element which caused the division was the woman question, and as the Garrisonian branch maintained the right of women to speak and vote in the conventions, all my sympathies were with the Garrisonians, though Mr. Stanton and Mr. Birney belonged to the other branch, called political abolitionists.  To me there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past, political, religious, and social.  It struck me as very remarkable that abolitionists, who felt so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own mothers, wives, and sisters, when, according to the common law, both classes occupied a similar legal status.

Our chief object in visiting England at this time was to attend the World’s Anti-slavery Convention, to meet June 12, 1840, in Freemasons’ Hall, London.  Delegates from all the anti-slavery societies of civilized nations were invited, yet, when they arrived, those representing associations of women were rejected.  Though women were members of the National Anti-slavery Society, accustomed to speak and vote in all its conventions, and to take an equally active part with men in the whole anti-slavery struggle, and were there as delegates from associations of men and women, as well as those distinctively of their own sex, yet all alike were rejected because they