It is you, you who combine the heart of a seraph with the head of a cherub, who know what trouble is.  You see where the shoe pinches, but your whole soul relucts from pointing out the tender place.  You see why things go wrong, and how they might be set right; but you have a mortal dread of being thought meddlesome and impertinent, or cold and cruel, or restless and arrogant, if you attempt to demolish the wrong or rebel against the custom.  When you draw your bow at an abuse, people think you are trying to bring down religion and propriety and humanity.  But your conscience will not let you see the abuse raving to and fro over the earth without taking aim; so, either way, you are cut to the heart.

I love men.  I adore women.  I value their good opinion.  There is much in them to applaud and imitate.  There is much in them to elicit faith and reverence.  If, only, one could see their good qualities alone, or, seeing their vapid and vicious ones, could contemplate them with no touch of tenderness for the owner, life might indeed be lovely.  As it is, while I am at one moment rapt in enthusiastic admiration of the strength and grace, the power and pathos, the hidden resources, the profound capabilities of my race, at another, I could wish, Nero-like, that all mankind were concentrated in one person and all womankind in another, that I might take them, after the fashion of rural schoolmasters, and shake their heads together.  Condemnation and reproach are not in my line; but there is so much in the world that merits condemnation and reproach and receives indifference and even reward, there is so much acquiescence in wrong doing and wrong thinking, so much letting things jolt along in the same rut wherein we and they were born, without inquiring whether, lifted into another groove, they might not run more easily, that, if one who does see the difficulty holds his peace, the very stones will cry out.  However gladly one would lie on a bed of roses and glide silken-sailed down the stream of life, how exquisitely painful soever it may be to say what you fear and feel may give pain, it is only a Sybarite who sets ease above righteousness, only a coward who misses victory through dread of defeat.

There are many false ideas afloat regarding womanly duties.  I do not design now to open anew any vulgar, worn-out, woman’s-rightsy question.  Every remark that could be made on that theme has been made—­but one, and that I will take the liberty to make now in a single sentence and close the discussion.  It is this:  the man who gave rubber-boots to women did more to elevate woman than all the theorizers, male or female, that ever were born.