The Tribune and Independent alone, if they would urge universal suffrage as they do negro suffrage, could carry this whole nation upon the only just plane of equal human rights.  What a power to hold and not use!....  They must take it up.  I shall see them the very first thing when I get home.  At your meeting next Monday evening, I think you should insist that all of the Hovey fund used for the Standard and anti-slavery purposes since slavery was abolished, must be returned with interest to the three causes which by the express terms of the will were to receive all of the fund when slavery should be ended.  I trust you will not fail to rebuke the cowardly use of the terms “universal,” “impartial” and “equal,” applied to hide a dark skin and an unpopular client....  I hope not a man will be asked to speak at the convention.  If they volunteer, very well, but I have been for the last time on my knees to Phillips, Higginson or any of them.  If they help now, they should ask us and not we them.

On May 9 and 10 the Equal Rights Association held its first anniversary in New York, at the Church of the Puritans.  Cordial and encouraging letters were received from Lydia Maria Child, Anna Dickinson, Clara Barton, Mary A. Livermore and many other distinguished women.  While there were the usual number of able speeches, the strongest discussion was on the following resolution, offered by Miss Anthony:  “The proposal to reconstruct our government on the basis of manhood suffrage, which emanated from the Republican party and has received the recent sanction of the American Anti-Slavery Society, is but a continuation of the old system of class and caste legislation, always cruel and proscriptive in itself and ending, in all ages, in national degradation and revolution.”  Henry Ward Beecher spoke eloquently in its favor, saying in part: 

[Autograph: 

  Yours truly,
  L. Maria Child.]

I am not a farmer, but I know that spring comes but once in the year.  When the furrow is open is the time to put in your seed, if you would gather a harvest in its season.  Now, when the red-hot plowshare of war has opened a furrow in this nation, is the time to put in the seed.  If any say to me, “Why will you agitate the woman question when it is the hour for the black man?” I answer, it is the hour for every man and every woman, black or white.  The bees go out in the morning to gather the honey from the morning-glories.  They take it when they are open, for by 10 o’clock they are shut, never to open again.  When the public mind is open, if you have anything to say, say it.  If you have any radical principles to urge, any higher wisdom to make known, don’t wait until quiet times come, until the public mind shuts up altogether.

We are in the favored hour; and if you have great principles to make known, this is the time to advocate them.  I therefore say whatever truth is to be known for the next fifty years in this