Mrs. Whiston always asserted that there was a mouse-hole
through the partition; but she had energy enough to have made a
hole herself, for the sake of the cause.
She never would tell us all she overheard. "It is enough," she
would say, "that I know how the thing is done."
I remember that we were all considerably startled when she first
gave us an outline of her plan. On my saying that I trusted the
dissemination of our principles would soon bring us a great
adhesion, she burst out with:
"Principles! Why if we trust to principles, we shall never
succeed! We must rely upon INFLUENCES, as the men do; we must
fight them with their own weapons, and even then we are at a
disadvantage, because we cannot very well make use of whiskey and
cigars."
We yielded, because we had grown accustomed to be guided by her;
and, moreover, we had seen, time and again, how she could succeed--
as, for instance, in the Nelson divorce case (but I don't suppose
you ever heard of that), when the matter seemed nigh hopeless to
all of us. The history of 1860 and the following winter proves
that in her the world has lost a stateswoman.
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