Then I tried
association among my own sex--among the most miserable and degraded of
them. I simply tried to put them into a position in which they might work
for each other, and not for a single tyrant; in which that tyrant's profits
might be divided among the slaves themselves. Experienced men warned me
that I should fail; that such a plan would be destroyed by the innate
selfishness and rivalry of human nature; that it demanded what was
impossible to find, good faith, fraternal love, overruling moral influence.
I answered, that I knew that already; that nothing but Christianity alone
could supply that want, but that it could and should supply it; that I
would teach them to live as sisters, by living with them as their sister
myself. To become the teacher, the minister, the slave of those whom I was
trying to rescue, was now my one idea; to lead them on, not by machinery,
but by precept, by example, by the influence of every gift and talent which
God had bestowed upon me; to devote to them my enthusiasm, my eloquence, my
poetry, my art, my science; to tell them who had bestowed their gifts on
me, and would bestow, to each according to her measure, the same on them;
to make my workrooms, in one word, not a machinery, but a family.
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