I saw a good deal of Harriet Martineau, and liked her very much indeed, in spite of her radicalism. She is gone to the South, where I think she cannot fail to do some good, if only in giving another impulse to the stone that already topples on the brink--I mean in that miserable matter of slavery. Yours very truly, F. A. B. [No more striking instance can be given of the rapidity of movement, if not of progress, of American public opinion, than the so-called "Woman's Rights" question. When these letters were written, scarcely a whisper had made itself heard upon this and its relative subjects: the "Female Suffrage" was neither demanded nor desired; Margaret Fuller had not made public her views upon the condition of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century"; the different legislatures of the different States had not found it expedient to enact statutes securing to married women the independent use of their own property, and women's legal disabilities were, in every respect, much the same in the United States as in the mother country. Now, however, so great and rapid has been the change of public opinion in this direction in America, that in some of the States married women may not only possess and inherit property over which their husbands have no control, but their personal earnings have been so secured to them that neither their husbands nor their husbands' creditors can touch them; while at the same time, strange to say, their husbands are still liable for their support, and answerable for any debts they may contract, and men must pay these independent ladies' milliners' bills, if all these additional _rights_ have not brought with them some additional sense of justice, honesty, and old-fashioned right and wrong.