we had better speak, or rather if they do not think we had better remain silent.”  I am sick at heart, but I can not carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends.  What can we do now when even the motion to retain the mother’s joint guardianship is voted down?  Twenty thousand petitions rolled up for that—­a hard year’s work—­the law secured—­the echoes of our words of gratitude in the Capitol scarcely died away, and now all is lost!

This year began the acquaintance with Anna Dickinson, whose letters are as refreshing as a breeze from the ocean: 

The sunniest of sunny mornings to you, how are you today?  Well and happy, I hope.  To tell the truth I want to see you very much indeed, to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you—­I can’t have you?  Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you....  I work closely and happily at my preparations for next winter—­no, for the future—­nine hours a day, generally; but I never felt better, exercise morning and evening, and never touch book or paper after gaslight this warm weather; so all those talks of yours were not thrown away upon me.

What think you of the “signs of the times?” I am sad always, under all my folly;—­this cruel tide of war, sweeping off the fresh, young, brave life to be dashed out utterly or thrown back shattered and ruined!  I know we all have been implicated in the “great wrong,” yet I think the comparatively innocent suffer today more than the guilty.  And the result—­will the people save the country they love so well, or will the rulers dig the nation’s grave?

    Will you not write to me, please, soon?  I want to see a touch of
    you very much.

[Autograph: 

  Very Affectionately Yours
  Anna E. Dickinson]

Early in September Greeley writes her:  “I still keep at work with the President in various ways and believe you will yet hear him proclaim universal freedom.  Keep this letter and judge me by the event.”

Miss Anthony thus lectures Mrs. Stanton because she has a teacher and educates her children at home:  “I am still of the opinion that whatever the short-comings of the public schools your children would be vastly more profited in them, side by side with the very multitude with whom they must mingle as soon as school days are over.  Any and every private education is a blunder, it seems to me.  I believe those persons stronger and nobler who have from childhood breasted the commonalty.  If children have not the innate strength to resist evil, keeping them apart from what they must inevitably one day meet, only increases their incompetency.”