There is great fear that if woman is allowed to vote, she will lose something of her high and excellent character. If it is right for woman to have the suffrage, it is not right to talk of expediency. If giving woman the ballot will cause her to lose her prestige, it is because she ought to lose it. If she gains physical strength and loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for nothing and cares for nothing but its own selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with joy unspeakable. My strong hands have tilled the fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed the horse, and brought the wood to the door; have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be shod. These are things I do not often tell in public. I have braved public opinion; I have tilled my garden; I have brought myself up from fainting weakness occasioned by accident and broken bones. I have taken care of myself, supported myself, and asked nothing from the world; I find my womanhood not one bit degraded. (Applause). A thousand times in the last years, in this struggle for bread, have I been asked, "Why don't you let your sons support you?" My answer is, "My six sons have their own duties. My six boys have their own labors. God gives me strength to earn my own bread, and I will do it as long as I can." (Applause). That is what I want to teach the womanhood of the country. I did not mean to talk so long; but I assure you I talk in earnest. If I sometimes, by a slip of the tongue, make some little mistake—for I have not been educated in the schools, (a log cabin schoolhouse in the wilderness gave me all I have)—you will excuse me, for I mean no injustice to any one. And if to-night it will not crowd some better woman or man from the platform, I shall be glad to speak to you again.
Mrs. Mott.—The argument that has been made that women do not want to vote is like that which we had to meet in the early days of the Anti-Slavery enterprise, that the slaves did not want to be free. I remember that in one of our earliest Woman's Rights Conventions, in Syracuse, a resolution was offered to the effect that as the assertion that the slave did not want his freedom, and would not take it if offered to him, only proved the depth of his degradation, so the assertion that woman had all the rights she wanted only gave evidence how far the influence of the law and customs, and the perverted application of the Scriptures, had encircled and crushed her. This was fifteen or twenty years ago. Times are altered since. In the temperance reformation, and in the great reformatory movements of our age, woman's powers have been called into action. They are beginning to see that another state of things is possible for them, and they are beginning to demand their rights. Why should this church be granted for such a meeting as this, but for the progress of the cause? Why are so many women present, ready to respond to the most ultra and most radical sentiments here, but that woman has grown and is able to assume her rights?
In many of the States the laws have been so modified that the wife now stands in a very different position as regards the right of property and other rights, from that which she occupied fifteen or twenty years ago. You see the same advance in the literary world. I remember when Maria Edgeworth and her sister first published their works, that they were afraid to publish their own name, and borrowed the name of their father. So Frances Power Cobbe was not able to write over her own name, and she issued her "Intuitive Morals" without a name; and her father was so much pleased with the