it? The enjoyment of that right to-day is no security that it will be continued to-morrow, so long as it is granted to us as a favor, and not claimed by us as a right. Woman must exercise her right to the elective franchise, and have her own representatives in our National councils, for two good reasons:
1st. Men can not represent us. They are so thoroughly educated into the belief that woman's nature is altogether different from their own, that they have no idea that she can be governed by the same laws of mind as themselves. So far from viewing us like themselves, they seem, from their legislation, to consider us their moral and intellectual antipodes; for whatever law they find good for themselves, they forthwith pass its opposite for us, and express the most profound astonishment if we manifest the least dissatisfaction. For example: our forefathers, full of righteous indignation, pitched King George, his authority, and his tea-chests, all into the sea, and because, forsooth, they were forced to pay taxes without being represented in the British Government. "Taxation without representation," was the text for many a hot debate in the forests of the New World, and for many an eloquent oration in the Parliament of the Old. Yet, in forming our new Government, they have taken from us the very rights which they fought and bled and, died to secure to themselves. They not only tax us, but in many cases they strip us of all we inherit, the wages we earn, the children of our love; and for such grievances we have no redress in any court of justice this side of Heaven. They tax our property to build colleges, then pass a special law prohibiting any woman to enter there. A married woman has no legal existence; she has no more absolute rights than a slave on a Southern plantation. She takes the name of her master, holds nothing, owns nothing, can bring no action in her own name; and the principle on which she and the slave is educated is the game. The slave is taught what is considered best for him to know—which is nothing; the woman is taught what is best for her to know—which is little more than nothing, man being the umpire in both cases. A woman can not follow out the impulses of her own mind in her sphere, any more than the slave can in his sphere. Civilly, socially, and religiously, she is what man chooses her to be, nothing more or less, and such is the slave. It is impossible for us to convince man that we think and feel exactly as he does; that we have the same sense of right and justice, the same love of freedom and independence. Some men regard us as devils, and some as angels; hence, one class would shut us up in a certain sphere for fear of the evil we might do, and the other for fear of the evil that might be done to us; thus, except for the sentiment of the thing, for all the good that it does us, we might as well be thought the one as the other. But we ourselves have to do with what we are and what we shall be.
2d. Men can not legislate for us. Our statute books and all past experience teach us this fact. His laws, where we are concerned, have been, without one exception, unjust, cruel, and aggressive. Having denied our identity with himself, he has no data to go upon in judging of our wants and interests. If we are alike in our mental structure, then there is no reason why we should not have a voice in making the laws which govern us; but if we are not alike, most certainly we must make laws for ourselves, for who else can understand what we need and desire? If it be admitted in this Government that all men and women are free and equal, then must we claim a place in our Senate Chamber and House of Representatives. But if, after all, it be found that even here we have classes and caste, not "Lords and Commons," but lords and women, then must we claim a lower House, where our Representatives can watch the passage of all bills affecting our own welfare, or the good of our country. Had the women of this country had a voice in the Government, think you our national escutcheon would have been stained with the guilt of aggressive warfare upon such weak, defenceless nations as the Seminoles and Mexicans? Think you we should cherish and defend, in the heart of our nation, such a wholesale system of piracy, cruelty, licentiousness, and ignorance as is our slavery? Think you that relic of barbarism, the gallows, by which the wretched murderer is sent with blood upon his soul, uncalled for, into the presence of his God, would be sustained by law? Verily, no, or I mistake woman's heart, her instinctive love of justice, and mercy, and truth!
Who questions woman's right to vote? We can show our credentials to the right of self-government; we get ours just where man got his; they are all Heaven-descended,