Any attempt to aid business by any feminine attraction was to my mind revolting in the extreme, and certain to bring final defeat.  In nothing has the church of Rome shown more wisdom than in the costume of her female missionaries.  When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home.  Had I made capital of my prettiness, I should have closed the doors of public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the world.

One day Mr. Riddle said: 

“I wish you had been here yesterday.  Robert Watson called.  He wanted to congratulate us on the relations we have for so long maintained.  We have never spoken of it, but you must have known the risk of coming here.  He has seen it, says he has watched you closely, and you are an exception to all known law, or the harbinger of a new era in human progress.”

Robert Watson was a retired lawyer of large wealth, who watched the world from his study, and philosophized about its doings; and when Mr. Riddle had given me this conclusion, the subject was never again referred to in our years of bargaining, buying and selling, paying and receipting.

CHAPTER XXII.

RECEPTION OF THE VISITER.

While preparing matter for the first number of the Visiter, I had time to think that so far as any organization was concerned, I stood alone.  I could not work with Garrison on the ground that the Constitution was pro-slavery, for I had abandoned that in 1832, when our church split on it and I went with the New School, who held that it was then anti-slavery.  The Covenanters, before it was adopted, denounced it as a “Covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”  I had long ago become familiar with the arguments on that side, and I concluded they were fallacious, and could not go back to them even for a welcome into the abolition ranks.

The political action wing of the anti-slavery party had given formal notice that no woman need apply for a place among them.  True, there was a large minority who dissented from this action, but there was division enough, without my furnishing a cause for contention.  So I took pains to make it understood that I belonged to no party.  I was fighting slavery on the frontier plan of Indian warfare, where every man is Captain-lieutenants, all the corporals and privates of his company.  I was like the Israelites in the days when there was no king, and “every man did that which, was right in his own eyes.”

It seemed good unto me to support James G. Birney, for President, and to promulgate the principles of the platform on which he stood in the last election.  This I would do, and no man had the right or power to stop me.  My paper was a six column weekly, with a small Roman letter head, my motto, “Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward,” the names of my candidates at the head of the editorial column and the platform inserted as standing matter.