To be esteemed worthy to speak for woman, for the slave, for humanity, is ever grateful to me, and I regret that I can not be with you at your annual gathering to get for myself a fresh baptism, a new and deeper faith. I would exhort all women to be discontented with their present condition and to assert their individuality of thought, word and action by the energetic doing of noble deeds. Idle wishes, vain repinings, loud-sounding declamations never can bring freedom to any human soul. What woman most needs is a true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect which shall scorn to eat the bread of dependence. Whoever consents to live by "the sweat of the brow" of another human being inevitably humiliates and degrades herself.... No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature. To her brother Daniel R., in Kansas, who was somewhat skeptical on the woman question, she sent this strong letter: Even the smallest human right denied, is large. The fact that the ruling class withhold this right is prima facie evidence that they deem it of importance for good or for evil. In either case, therefore, the human being is outraged. It, perchance, may matter but little whether Kansas be governed by a constitution made by her bona fide settlers or by people of another State or by Congress; but for Kansas to be denied the right to make her own constitution and laws is an outrage not to be tolerated. So the constitution and laws of a State and nation may be just as considerate of woman's needs and wants as if framed by herself, yet for man to deny her the right to a voice in making and administering them, is paralleled only by the Lecompton usurpation. For any human being or class of human beings, whether black, white, male or female, tamely to submit to the denial of their right to self-government shows that the instinct of liberty has been blotted out. You blunder on this question of woman's rights just where thousands of others do. You believe woman unlike man in her nature; that conditions of life which any man of spirit would sooner die than accept are not only endurable to woman but are needful to her fullest enjoyment. Make her position in church, State, marriage, your own; everywhere your equality ignored, everywhere made to feel another empowered by law and time-honored custom to prescribe the privileges to be enjoyed and the duties to be discharged by you; and then if you can imagine yourself to be content and happy, judge your mother and sisters and all women to be.