Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Victoria C. Woodhull leaves this country shortly forEurope, and has prepared a lecture, which will be herfarewell utterance. Those who heard Mrs. Woodhullrecently at Paine Hall bear unanimous testimony to thehumanitarian character of her address; she is the advocateof peculiar, because novel and original, views. ATimes reporter has obtained a full report of her farewelladdress, and it is so full of instruction, and presentsnew social ideas in so fresh and thoroughly effective amanner, that no apology is needed for submitting it, inextenso, to the public. It is entitled “The Review ofa Century; or, The Fruit of Five Thousand Years,”and is as follows:—
A hundred years ago, in an upper room in Philadelphia, five menwere gathered—men of noble bearing, of brilliant intellects, ofundoubted character. Their faces wore a look of stern determination,as if the theme of their consideration was of matters of graveimport; was of matters destined to be the beginning of the mostimportant era that had ever dawned upon the earth. A centuryand eighty years before, a single ship-load of men, women andchildren, had landed on this virgin soil at Jamestown in Virginia;and a few years later, another one at Plymouth-Rock in Massachusetts.To these, additions had been made until the thirteenStates then numbered fully three million souls, upon whom “theking” had imposed onerous taxation, and over whom he hadplaced obnoxious rulers. The tea had been destroyed in Boston4harbour, and the people were wrought up to the intensest pitch bytheir oppressions. They had come from their native lands toescape from tyranny, and were not disposed to brook it here. Inthis wild, free land, they had become pregnant of liberty, and wereeven then struggling in the throes of travail. These five men hadmet to find a way in which the delivery might be safely made, sothat both the mother and the child should live to bless the world.
Washington, Adams, Franklin, Rush, Paine—every one of themimmortal names—struggled with the task with which God hadentrusted them. They felt the great responsibility, and their faces,as they looked into each other’s eyes, spoke their anxiety. Eachknew that every other as well as self had something in his heartthat he dared not utter. They looked inquiringly aga