and Antoinette Blackwell....  Called at Dr. Cheever’s, and also had an interview with Robert Dale Owen....  Went to Worcester to see Abby Kelly Foster and from there to Boston....  Found Dr. Harriot K. Hunt ready for woman suffrage work.  Took dinner at Garrison’s.  Saw Whipple and May, then went to Wendell Phillips’....  Spent the day with Caroline M. Severance, at West Newton.  She is earnest in the cause of women....  Returned to New York and commenced work in earnest.  Spent nearly all the Christmas holidays addressing and sending off petitions.

Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton entered heartily into the plans of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton.  Mr. Tilton proposed that they should form a National Equal Rights Association, demanding suffrage for negroes and for women, that Mr. Phillips should be its president, the Anti-Slavery Standard its official organ; and Mr. Beecher agreed to lecture in behalf of this new movement.  Mr. Tilton came out with a strong editorial in the Independent, advocating suffrage for women and paying a beautiful tribute to the efficient services in the past of those who were now demanding recognition of their political rights: 

A LAW AGAINST WOMEN.—­The spider-crab walks backward.  Borrowing this creature’s mossy legs, two or three gentlemen in Washington are seeking to fix these upon the Federal Constitution, to make that instrument walk backward in like style.  For instance, the Constitution has never laid any legal disabilities upon woman.  Whatever denials of rights it formerly made to our slaves, it denied nothing to our wives and daughters.  The legal rights of an American woman—­for instance, her right to her own property, as against a squandering husband; or her right to her own children as against a malicious father—­have grown, year by year, into a more generous and just statement in American laws.  This beautiful result is owing in great measure to the persistent efforts of many noble women who, for years past, both publicly and privately, by pen and speech, have appealed to legislative committees and to the whole community for an enlargement of the legal and civil status of their fellow-countrywomen.  Signal, honorable and beneficent have been the works and words of Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Kelly Foster, Frances D. Gage, Lucy Stone, Caroline H. Ball, Antoinette Blackwell, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others.  Not in all the land lives a poor woman or a widow who does not owe some portion of her present safety under the law to the brave exertions of these faithful laborers.

All forward-looking minds know that, sooner or later, the chief public question in this country will be woman’s claim to the ballot.  The Federal Constitution, as it now stands, leaves this question an open one for the several States to settle as they choose.  Two bills, however, now lie before Congress proposing to array the