DEAR MRS. STONE:—One should be especially inspired this Centennial year before venturing to speak or write. I am not so blest, and find myself so busy trying to get ready for the good time that is surely coming, I can only in a very humble way, help on the cause all women should have at heart.
As reports are in order, I should like to say a word for the girls, on whom in a great measure, depends the success of the next generation.
My lines fell in pleasant places last year, and I looked well about me as I went among the young people, who unconsciously gave me some very cheering facts in return for very poor fictions.
I was both surprised and delighted with the nerve and courage, the high aims and patient persistence, which appeared, not only among the laborious young women whose teacher is necessity, but among tenderly nurtured girls who cherished the noblest ambitions and had learned to earn the happiness no wealth could buy them.
Having great faith in young America, it gave me infinite satisfaction to find such eager interest in all good things, and to see how irresistably the spirit of our new revolution, stirring in the hearts of sisters and daughters, was converting the fathers and brothers who loved them. One shrewd, business man said, when talking of Woman Suffrage, “How can I help believing in it, when I’ve got a wife and six girls who are bound to have it?”
And many a grateful brother declared he could not be mean enough to shut any door in the face of the sister who had made him what he was.
So I close this hasty note by proposing three cheers for the girls of 1876—and the hope that they will prove themselves worthy descendants of the mothers of this Revolution, remembering that
“Earth’s fanatics make
Too often Heaven’s saints.”
Concord, June 29
L. M. ALCOTT.