I shall show _who did do it_, and who is responsible for bringing on me that hard duty of making these disclosures, which it appears to me ought to have been made by others.
I claim that these facts were given to me unguarded by any promise or seal of secrecy, expressed or implied; that they were lodged with me as one sister rests her story with another for sympathy, for counsel, for defence.

_Never_ did I suppose the day would come that I should be subjected to so cruel an anguish as this use of them has been to me.
Never did I suppose that,--when those kind hands, that had shed nothing but blessings, were lying in the helplessness of death, when that gentle heart, so sorely tried and to the last so full of love, was lying cold in the tomb,--a countryman in England could be found to cast the foulest slanders on her grave, and not one in all England to raise an effective voice in her defence.
I admit the feebleness of my plea, in point of execution.

It was written in a state of exhausted health, when no labour of the kind was safe for me,--when my hand had not strength to hold the pen, and I was forced to dictate to another.
I have been told that I have no reason to congratulate myself on it as a literary effort.

O my brothers and sisters! is there then nothing in the world to think of but literary efforts?
I ask any man with a heart in his bosom, if he had been obliged to tell a story so cruel, because his mother's grave gave no rest from slander,--I ask any woman who had been forced to such a disclosure to free a dead sister's name from grossest insults, whether she would have thought of making this work of bitterness a literary success?
Are the cries of the oppressed, the gasps of the dying, the last prayers of mothers,--are _any_ words wrung like drops of blood from the human heart to be judged as literary efforts?
My fellow-countrymen of America, men of the press, I have done you one act of justice,--of all your bitter articles, I have read not one.

I shall never be troubled in the future time by the remembrance of any unkind word you have said of me, for at this moment I recollect not one.
I had such faith in you, such pride in my countrymen, as men with whom, above all others, the cause of woman was safe and sacred, that I was at first astonished and incredulous at what I heard of the course of the American press, and was silent, not merely from the impossibility of being heard, but from grief and shame.