She was at this time becoming deeply interested in politics but had not dreamed that she herself ever would enter the ranks of political speakers.  In October she complains of her restlessness and her anxiety to go home, but she is not strong and knows it would be impossible to keep up the treatment there, so she says:  “Because of this, and because of my great desire to be able to do what now seems my life work, I have decided to stay awhile longer.”  But in this same letter she adds:  “If Merritt is sick and needs me I will go to him at once.  My waking and sleeping thoughts are with him.”  This young brother had insisted upon going West to seek his fortune and was taken ill in Iowa.  At one time when he asked for some money he had saved, and his father, thinking he was too young to be trusted, did not let him have it, Miss Anthony wrote:  “It is too bad to treat him like a child.  Let him make a blunder even; it will do much more to develop him than the judgment of father, mother and all the brothers and sisters.  He ought to have the privilege, since it is clearly his right, to invest his money exactly as he pleases and I hope he will yet be trusted at least with his own funds.”

To a woman who is publishing a paper and complains that her efforts are neither helped nor appreciated, she replies:  “Every individual woman who launches into a work hitherto monopolized by men, must stand or fall in her own strength or weakness.  Whatever we manufacture we must study to make it for the interest of the community to purchase.  If we fail in this, we must improve the work....  Each of us individually has her own duties to perform and each of us alone must work out her life problem.”

In October the National Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Cincinnati but she was unable to attend.  It was the only one she missed from 1852 until the breaking out of the war, when they were abandoned for a number of years, and she felt so distressed that she wrote to Rochester and persuaded her sister Mary to get leave of absence from school and go in her place.  We know she has a very pretty bonnet this fall, for she says:  “It is trimmed with dark green ribbon, striped with black and white, and for face trimming, lace and cherry and green flowers with the least speck of blue.”  She grieves because her married sisters never have time to write her, and says: 

But so it is; every wife and mother must devote herself wholly to home duties, washing and cleaning, baking and mending—­these are the must be’s; the culture of the soul, the enlargement of the faculties, the thought of anything or anybody beyond the home and family are the may be’s.  When society is rightly organized, the wife and mother will have time, wish and will to grow intellectually, and will know that the limits of her sphere, the extent of her duties, are prescribed only by the measure of her ability.

Her daily treatment at the “water cure”