Anna Dickinson's New Book

[…] Will be poisoned in turn; to put to the mouths of the weak in will, the strong in appetite, that that will destroy body and brain, reason and conscience, home and happiness, heart and soul, together. What shouldst thou know of such matters? To know is to be contaminated; keep thy ignorance, and thy womanly charm together. Let government go to rack, let commerce and society conspire to accomplish evil, let lives be blasted and hearts be broken, and souls be damned. What are these to thee? Thy sole duty is as a violet to smell sweet, as a flute to sound fine harmonies. And yet, sir, and yet, madam, God created this woman, not a flower, not a flute, but a living soul; as such to receive help, and to yield help to all other living souls; to it intrusted seed to sow, talents to multiply, work to be done. O, my sisters! the world is groaning and travailing in pain until this day, crying out of the darkness wherein it gropes, out of the anguish in which it writhes, for your hands and help and care. Where, then, are your woman's hearts and your woman's conscience that you are silent and still?

Go you to the asylums and the hospitals, and make of them homes. Go to the jails, the prisons, the penitentiaries, and make them reformatories and regenerators. Go to the ignorant, the rude, the stupid and see that the light of intelligence is let into their night of mental bondage. Go to the doors through which men go in men and come out wild beasts—the doors that return, for the money there left, poverty, fighting, dismantled homes, brawls, murders; that absorb man and money, and in exchange crowd almshouses and jails and ripen fruit for that ghastly tree of civilization—the gallows. Standing there, in behalf of men, of women, of children, of society alike outraged, defied, dishonored, destroyed, say 'In the name of the law, and with the power of the law, I stop this wholesale poison and butchery.'