In the course of a life-time you consume whole harvests and droves of cattle, and every day you live, breathe forty hogsheads of good, pure air.  You must by some kind of usefulness pay for all this.  Our race was the last thing created—­the birds and fishes on the fourth day, the cattle and lizards on the fifth day, and man on the sixth day.  If geologists are right, the earth was a million of years in the possession of the insects, beasts, and birds before our race came upon it.  In one sense we were innovators.  The cattle, the lizards, and the hawks had pre-emption right.  The question is not what we are to do with the lizards and summer insects, but what the lizards and summer insects are to do with us.  If we want a place in this world, we must earn it.  The partridge makes its own nest before it occupies it.  The lark by its morning song earns its breakfast before it eats it, and the Bible gives an intimation that the first duty of an idler is to starve when it says:  “If he will not work, neither shall he eat.”  Idleness ruins the health; and very soon nature says:  “This man has refused to pay his rent, out with him!” Society is to be reconstructed on the subject of woman’s toil.  A vast majority of those who would have woman industrious shut her up to a few kinds of work.  My judgment in this matter is that a woman has a right to do anything that she can do well.  There should be no department of merchandise, mechanism, art, or science barred against her.  If Miss Hosmer has genius for sculpture, give her a chisel.  If Rosa Bonheur has a fondness for delineating animals, let her make “The Horse Fair.”  If Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry ladder.  If Lydia will be a merchant, let her sell purple.  If Lucretia Mott will preach the Gospel, let her thrill with her womanly eloquence the Quaker meeting-house.

It is said, If woman is given such opportunities she will occupy places that might be taken by men.  I say, If she have more skill and adaptedness for any position than a man has, let her have it!  She has as much right to her bread, to her apparel, and to her home, as men have.  But it is said that her nature is so delicate that she is unfitted for exhausting toil.  I ask in the name of all past history what toil on earth is more severe, exhausting, and tremendous than that toil of the needle to which for ages she has been subjected?  The battering-ram, the sword, the carbine, the battle-ax, have made no such havoc as the needle.  I would that these living sepulchers in which women have for ages been buried might be opened, and that some resurrection trumpet might bring up these living corpses to the fresh air and sunlight.