In our country, where reason and moderation so easily quench the fires of insane hate, and where the vendetta is so easily overcome by the sublime grace of forgiveness, no woman could have been found so desperate as to sacrifice all spiritual, temporal, and social good, self, offspring, fame, honor, and all the desiderata of life, and time, and immortality, to the commission, or even countenance, of such a deed of horror, as we have been compelled to contemplate during the two months past.

In a Christian land, where all records and results of the world’s intellectual, civil, and moral advancement mold the human heart and mind to highest impulses, the theory of old Helvetius is more probable than desirable.

The natures of all born in equal station are not so widely varied as to present extremes of vice and goodness, but by the effects of rarest and severest experience.  Beautiful fairies and terrible gnomes do not stand by each infant’s cradle, sowing the nascent mind with tenderest graces or vilest errors.  The slow attrition of vicious associations and law-defying indulgences, or the sudden impetus of some terribly multiplied and social disaster, must have worn away the susceptibility of conscience and self-respect, or dashed the mind from the height of these down to the depths of despair and recklessness, before one of ordinary life could take counsel with violence and crime.  In no such manner was the life of our client marked.  It was the parallel of nearly all the competent masses.  Surrounded by the scenes of her earliest recollections, independent in her condition she was satisfied with the mundus of her daily pursuits, and the maintenance of her own and children’s status in society and her Church.

Remember your wives, mothers, sisters, and gentle friends whose graces, purity, and careful affection, ornament and cherish and strengthen your lives.  Not widely different from their natures and spheres have been the nature and sphere of the woman who sits in the prisoner’s dock to-day, mourning with the heart of Alcestis her children and her lot; by whose desolated hearthstone a solitary daughter wastes her uncomforted life away in tears and prayers and vigils for the dawn of hope; and this wretchedness and unpitied despair have closed like a shadow around one of earth’s common pictures of domestic peace and social comfort, destroyed by the one sole cause—­suspicion fastened and fed upon the facts of acquaintance and mere fortuitous intercourse with that man in whose name so many miseries gather, the assassin of the President.

Since the days when Christian teachings first elevated woman to her present free, refined, and refining position, man’s power and honoring regard have been the palladium of her sex.

Let no stain of injustice, eager for a sacrifice to revenge, rest upon the reputation of the men of our country and time!