portionment of legislative powers and duties, man will cheerfully concede it.
"But would you have woman hold elections like ours"? No! we would not! We would have her teach us how to take the sense of the electors far more quietly and cheaply. When a department of legislation shall be assigned to woman, we would have her collect through school-district, or kindred organizations, the names of all female citizens who possess the qualifications, other than of sex, required from male voters at our elections. These being duly, lucidly registered, let, then, women in each Assembly district be designated to collect the votes of its women. Let them simply advertise the address to which votes should be sent and appoint a week wherein to collect them. Now, let every female citizen write her ballot and enclose it, signing her name to the address indicated; and due time having been allowed for votes to arrive by mail or otherwise, let the votes be duly canvassed, and the result ascertained and declared, and certificates of election issued accordingly.
Under this plan, the invalid, the bed-ridden, the bereaved, and even the absent, could vote as well as others, and the cost of holding an election throughout the State need not reach $10,000. Such are the outlines of our views regarding woman in politics. They are doubtless susceptible of improvement; but we think not by effacing in politics the natural and time-honored distinctions between women and men. A female legislature, a jury of women, we could abide; a legislature of men and women, a jury promiscuously drawn from the sexes we do not believe in.The New York Independent published the following criticism on Mr. Greeley's report a few days after its publication:
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.
BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.
Your committee does not recommend an extension of the elective franchise to woman. 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 as the 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.
In the above extract from the majority report of the Committee on Suffrage we have substantially four reasons why the committee did not recommend an extension of the elective franchise to women.
1st. Public sentiment does not demand it.
2d. It would be an innovation revolutionary and sweeping.
3d. It is at war with a distribution of duties and functions between the sexes.
4th. The enfranchisement of women would disturb relations as venerable as government itself, and radically change our domestic life.
Shades of Jeremy Bentham and Sidney Smith forgive! After publishing to the world that immortal oration of Noodledom, and refuting for all time such fallacies as the above, how amazing that Radical Republicans in the capital of the Empire State should repeat in the ears of the nineteenth century stale platitudes from the effete civilizations of the Old World—that to