all the distinctions, all the honors, and all the wealth which man is capable of desiring, appreciating, or grasping, exercises a powerful, indeed a controlling influence in making our people what they are, and our nation what it is.
These petitions ask only that these rights, enjoyed by one portion of the American people, may be extended to embrace the whole, not less for the abstract but all-sufficient reason, that they have been given to the whole by the Creator, than that by their application to the whole, the more general will be the benefits experienced; and the deeper, broader, more prevailing and more enduring will become those benefits. Manifestly, such must be the case; for as these rights belong to humanity, and produce their exalted and beneficial fruits by their application to and upon humanity, it follows that, wherever humanity is, there they belong, and there they will work out their beneficial results. To exclude woman from the possession of equal political rights with man, it should be shown that she is essentially a different being; that the Creator of man is not her Creator; that she has not the same evil to shun, the same heaven to gain; in short, the same grand, immortal destiny which is supposed to invite to high uses the capacity of man, does not pertain to nor invite her. We say this must be shown; and if it can not be, as certainly it can not, then it follows that to withhold these rights, so beneficial to one portion, is to work an immediate and particular injury to those from whom they are withheld, and, although a more indirect, not a less certain injury to all. Man-masculine is not endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights because he is male, but because he is human; and when, in virtue of our strong and superior physical capacity, we deny to man-feminine the rights which are ours only in virtue of our humanity, we exercise the same indefensible tyranny against which we felt justified in taking up arms, and perilling life and fortune.
The argument against conceding these rights all are familiar with. They are precisely the same which have been in the mouths of tyrants from the beginning of time, and have been urged against any and every demand for popular liberty. A want of capacity for self-government — freedom will be only licentiousness — and out of the possession of rights will grow only the practice of follies and wrongs. This is the argument, in brief, applied t+ every step of gradual emancipation on the part of the male, and now by him applied to the female struggling to reach the common platform. Should the American male, in the van of human progress, as the result of this theory of a capacity for self-government, turn round and ignore this divinity, this capacity in another branch of the human family? The theory has worked only good in its application thus far, and it is a most unreasonable, a most unwarrantable distrust to expect it to produce mischief when applied to others in all respects mentally and morally the equals of those who now enjoy it. It neither can nor will do 80; but, necessarily, the broader and more universal its application, the broader and more universal its benefits.
The possession of political rights by woman does not necessarily imply that she must or will enter into the practical conduct of all the institutions, proper and improper, now established and maintained by the male portion of the race. These institutions may be right and necessary, or they may not, and the nature of woman may or may not be in harmony with them. It is not proposed to enact a law compelling woman to do certain things, but it is proposed simply to place her side by side with man on a common platform of rights, confident