Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/307

C. C. Dwight, June 26th, offered a resolution that "The Standing Committee on the Right of Suffrage be instructed to provide for women to vote as to whether they wanted the right to vote after the adoption of the New Constitution.

Mr. Merritt, July 11th, moved that "The question of Woman Suffrage be submitted at the election of 1868 or 1869. Referred to the Committee of the Whole.

Horace Greeley, Chairman of the Committee, in his report, after recommending universal "manhood suffrage," said:

Having thus briefly set forth the considerations which seem to us decisive in favor of the few and moderate changes proposed, we proceed to indicate our controlling reasons for declining to recommend other and in some respects more important innovations. Your committee does not recommend an extension of the elective franchise to women. However defensible in theory, we are satisfied that public sentiment does not demand and would not sustain an innovation so revolutionary and sweeping, so openly at war with a distribution of duties and functions between the sexes as venerable and pervading as government itself, and involving transformations so radical in social and domestic life. Should we prove to be in error on this head, the Convention may overrule us by changing a few words in the first section of our proposed article.

Nor have we seen fit to propose the enfranchisement of boys above the age of eighteen years. The current ideas and usages in our day, but especially in this country, seem already to set too strongly in favor of the relaxation, if not total overthrow of parental authority, especially over half-grown boys. With the sincerest good-will for the class in question, we submit that they may spend the hours which they can spare from their labors and their lessons more usefully and profitably in mastering the wisdom of the sages and philosophers who have elucidated the science of government, than in attendance on midnight caucuses, or in wrangling around the polls.

Albany, June 28, 1867.

Horace Greeley, Chairman,	Wm. H. Merrill,
Leslie W. Russell,	Geo. Williams.

Mr. Cassidy presented a minority report urging a separate submission of the question of negro suffrage, in which he said:

If the regeneration of political society is to be sought in the incorporation of this element into the constituency, it must be done by the direct and explicit vote of the electors. We are foreclosed from any other course by the

———

Train's defense of women voting was received by the Convention by loud and repeated applause. The following was the resolution, passed unanimously, offering the hall:

State Of New York, In Constitutional Convention, Albany, December 4, 1867.

$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$

On motion of Mr. Ballard:
Resolved, That the use of the Assembly Chamber be granted to Geo. Francis Train, Esq., at 4 p. m. this day.
By order.Luther Caldwell, Secretary.