MY DEAR FRIEND--The thirtieth anniversary of the first woman's rights convention ever held with special reference to demanding the elective franchise irrespective of sex well deserves to be commemorated in the manner set forth in the call for the same, at Rochester, on the 19th instant. As a substitute for my personal attendance, I can only send a brief but warm congratulatory epistle on the cheering progress which the movement has made within the period named. For how widely different are the circumstances under which that convention was held, and those which attend the celebration of its third decade! Then, the assertion of civil and political equality, alike for men and women, excited widespread disgust and astonishment, as though it were a proposition to repeal the laws of nature, and literally to "turn the world upside down"; and it was ridiculed and caricatured as little short of lunacy. Now, it is a subject of increasing interest and grave consideration, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and what at first appeared to be so foolish in pretension is admitted by all reflecting and candid minds to be deserving of the most respectful treatment. Then, its avowed friends, were indeed "few and far between," even among those disfranchised as the penalty of their womanhood. Now, they can be counted by tens of thousands, and their number is augmenting--foremost in intelligence, in weight of character, in strength of understanding, in manly and womanly development, and in all that goes to make up enlightened citizenship. Then, with rare exceptions, women were everywhere remanded to poverty and servile dependence, being precluded from following those avocations and engaging in those pursuits which make competency and independence not a difficult achievement. Now, there is scarcely any situation or profession, in the arrangements of society, to which they may not and do not aspire, and in which many of them are not usefully engaged; whether in new and varied industrial employment, in the arts and sciences, in the highest range of literature, in philosophic and mathematical investigations, in the professions of law, medicine, and divinity, in high scholarship, in educational training and supervision, in rhetoric and oratory, in the lyceum, or in discharging the official duties connected with the various departments of the State and national governments.