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  • Oct. 28, 1871

    THE BOSTON EXCLUSIVES AGAIN.

    People who do not stand upon principles and guide all their actions by them are always found contradicting and stultifying themselves. People who tell lies must resort to habitual lying in order to be consistent and not expose themselves; but such persons are, sooner or later, certain to be detected, since it is natural for people to speak the truth rather than to lie; and sometimes they will forget themselves and act in accordance with their natural inclination.

    We are forcibly reminded of this general rule of life from comparing the present attitude of some of the "Boston Exclusives" with that assumed by them in past time. Last week was presented the protest against marriage laws made by Lucy Stone, who is most vehement against us for now advocating their amendment; This week we contrast the position of the editor-in-chief of the organ of the Exclusives with that she occupied in 1869.

    On the 15th of July, at a Woman Suffrage Convention at Plano, Ill., Mrs. Livermore, then a resident of Chicago, made the following speech upon the proposition that "the men and women most forward in this movement are of immoral character," are such as we do not most desire to pin our teeth to: "Mrs. Livermore," says the Aurora Herald, "denied the above in toto. She was herself President of the Woman Suffrage Association in the west, and Mrs. Jane Willing, of Rockford, was the Secretary. The well-known advocates of the cause were of the purest morality. No purer girl lives than Anna Dickinson? No more tender mother than Mrs. Cady Stanton; no truer woman Susan B. Anthony; and hosts of the great and good men throughout the land."

    "But what difference does it make to the hungry man whether his food comes to him on a dish of gold or silver, or of wood? In either case it satisfies hunger as well. What difference does it make who buys it? And so with the truth—whether presented by an angel or a devil, the truth is all the same; and blind is the man who cannot see that. Is Woman Suffrage right? That is the question. What matters it who advocates it, whether Free Lovers, Spiritualists, or the Methodists, orthodox or heterodox? It makes no difference. ‘Truth is truth wherever we find it.’" The Herald afterward says: "To Mrs. Livermore was tendered the thanks of the Convention for her instructive speeches, accompanied by a roll of greenbacks."

    Mrs. Livermore at that time belonged to the class who were the objects of abuse, who were called all sorts of bad names by the then "respectables." But a change has come over the spirit of her life. She has contracted the disease of respectability and can abuse as vilely as the most pious of former times. Then Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were good women and true. Now they are not fit for the prae [sic] excellent Bostonians to mingle with at all; indeed, they will have nothing to do with anything that either these ladies associate with. They are even doing the cause "great injury," according to the paper Mrs. Livermore edits, because they hold more advanced social ideas than are considered admissible by the clique of which she is chief. But Mrs. Livermore considered the truth of suffrage to be acceptable even from Free Lovers and Spiritualists then, while now they are not even to be permitted to so much as approach the pla5tform upon which "the immaculates" stand. They are even so discourteous as to tell them in a call for a convention that they are not wanted. We presume Mrs. Livermore and the rest of her set are not as hungry for suffrage now as she was then, since they will not accept it through anything that has a taint of Wood about it. Suffrage must be tendered to them on golden plates; and be most graciously offered by satin-clothed servants; their tastes have so improved upon what they were that anything short of this will not agree with their present delicate sensibilities. . . .

    For our part we should be very glad to have the movement for suffrage receive the support of all persons who are honest advocates of it; but we maintain now, as Mrs. Livermore did in 1869, that whoever rejects aid, let it come from whatever source it may, is not for suffrage but against it; and Mrs. Livermore and all the rest of that clique know it is so. And when they say that the 150,000 readers of a paper which advocates suffrage earnestly and persistently, are not representatives of the movement, and, in fact do not belong to it at all, simply because they patronize that paper which advocates Lucy Stone’s former marriage theory in preference to the Journal, they know they speak a lie of which they are liable to convict themselves, whenever the spirit of truth predominates over their assumed policy of falsehood.

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