In one of his lectures upon Art, John Ruskin says:—
"Every leaf we have seen, connects its work with the entire and accumulated result of the work of its predecessors. Dying, it leaves its own small but well-labored thread; adding, if imperceptibly, yet essentially, to the strength, from root to crest, of the trunk on which it has lived, and fitting that trunk for better service to the next year's foliage."
Let these words, printed on my titlepage, show the modesty of my aim, and the conscientious steadfastness of my purpose. As the leaf is to the tree, so is the individual to society. Tear away a single leaf from the towering crest, and the trunk does not seem to suffer: nevertheless, one small thread withers, one channel dries up, one source of beauty and use fails; and, from that moment, a certain sidewise tendency marks the growth.
To compact carefully one "well-labored thread," is all that I have sought to do,—to write a little book, that women might be won to read, as conscientiously as if it were a heavy tome, to be endlessly consulted by the bench.
In writing these three lectures, I feel quite sure that I must have made use of many significant expressions borrowed from those who have broken the way for me. For many years an extemporaneous lecturer on this and kindred topics, I have so wrought certain modes of expression into the fabric of my thought, that I do not know where to put my quotation-marks. To Mrs. Hugo Reed, for instance, I know I must be under great obligations; and I can only hope, that she will trust me with her thoughts and words as generously as I desire to trust all my readers with mine. It is little matter who does the work, so that it be done; but I owe to one author, in particular, something like an explanation.
A few days before the third of these lectures was delivered in Boston (that is, before Jan. 23, 1861), a gentleman from Paris brought me from Madame d'Héricourt a book called "La Femme Affranchie," an answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, and Comte, which its author kindly desired I should translate for the American market. Unable to comply with her request, some weeks elapsed before I opened the book. I was struck with the energy, self-possession, and rapidity with which she seized the various points of the subject, with the thoroughness of her assault, and the temper of her argument. I did not sympathize in all her methods or conclusions; but I was interested to observe, that, in what I had then written and publicly spoken of the relations between suffrage and humanity, I had, in several instances, used her very words, or she had used mine. I did not alter my manuscript; but, with better times, we may hope for a translation of her spirited volumes, and the public will then do justice to her precedence.
I have been anxious to have positive proof of my conjecture in regard to the authorship of the "Lawe's Resolution of the Rights of Women;" but persevering endeavors in England, in several directions, have only left the matter as it stands in the text. It would be very interesting to know something of the private history of the man who wrote that book.
In the first of the following lectures, I have ventured a rhetorical allusion to the blue-laws of Connecticut. Since it went to press, I have seen it stated, on high authority, that any American writer who should "profess to believe in the existence of the blue-laws of New Haven would simply proclaim himself a dunce;" and the "Saturday Review" has been handled without gloves for taking this existence for granted.
I never supposed that the term "blue" applied to the color of the paper on which such laws were printed, any more than I supposed "blue Presbyterianism" referred to the color of the presbyters' gowns. I supposed it was the outgrowth of a popular sarcasm, descriptive, not of a "veritable code," nor of a "practical code unpublished," but of such portions of the general code as were repugnant to common sense, and the genial nature of man. This I still think will be found to be the case; and it is certainly to Connecticut divines and Connecticut newspapers that we owe the popular impression.