Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/220

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History of Woman Suffrage.

work, without knowing it was his daughter's, that it led to an acknowledgment after a while.

Stephen S. Foster: Will you give us the evidence that the statement that the women of this country do not want the ballot is not true? I should be glad to believe that; but in my experience the worst opposition to the progress of Woman's Rights has come from woman herself. The greatest indifference to the cause is to be found among women, and not among men. I wish it were not so. I hope I am mistaken. But I believe nine out of every ten of our public speakers will tell you that they find more help, more sympathy from men than from women.

Rev. S. J. May: I should like to have that question settled, so far as the women present are concerned. Will as many of you as will vote when the right is awarded to you, please to manifest it by rising.

Nearly the whole of the ladies present immediately arose. Indeed, those on the platform, could not see a single woman who retained her seat.

Mrs. Gage: During the last fifteen years, with the utmost industry I could use in ascertaining the public opinion in this country, I have never found one solitary instance of a woman, whom I could meet alone by her fireside, where there was no fear of public opinion, or the minister, or the law-maker, or her father, or her husband, who did not tell me she would like to vote. [Applause]. I never found a slave in my life, who, removed from the eye of the people about him, would not tell me he wanted liberty—never one. I have been in the slave States for years. I have been in the slave-pens, and upon the plantations, and have stood beside the slave as he worked in the sugar cane and the cotton-field; and I never found one who dared in the presence of white men to say he wanted freedom. When women and young girls are asked if they want to vote, they are almost always in just that situation where they are afraid to speak what they think; and no wonder they so often say they do not want to vote.

EVENING SESSION.

The meeting was called to order by the President, Mrs. Mott, who introduced as the first speaker Col. Charles E. Moss, of Missouri.

Mr. Moss said: This is a subject upon which I have thought for a number of years; and I have become fully convinced that no reason can be assigned for extending the right of suffrage to any of the male sex, that does not equally apply to the female.

When our fathers formed the national Constitution, they made it their duty to secure to every State a republican form of government. No government can be republican in form, unless it is so in substance and in fact; based upon the consent of the governed. After the troublesome war we have just passed through, we are called upon not only to reconstruct the ten unrepresented States of the nation, but to purify the republicanism of our government in the Northern States and make it more consistent with our professions. It is a fit time, then, to take up the subject of suffrage, and to