ency by the wisdom of those who control the government, to a certain class. If this right to vote be what the Senator from Indiana declares it to be, a natural and inalienable right, then you have no more right to deny it to a person who is under the age of twenty-one than you have to deny it to a person who is over the age of twenty-one years. Sir, the difference is radical. Voting is no right; it is a privilege granted, a franchise which is granted to certain classes, more or less extended according to the supposed expediency which shall control the minds of those who frame the constitution of government for a people. There is no wrong done, so far as the abnegation of a right is involved, by denying this to certain classes of a community, whether on account of age or sex or any other supposed causes of disqualification. In this country the whole foundation of our institutions has been that the male sex when arrived at years of supposed discretion alone should take part in the political control of the country.
It is not necessary for me to speak now of other influences than those that come from politics; it is not necessary for me to dwell upon the actual and potential influences that control the fate of men and of nations. We all know they are not those most apparent. We all know it is the passions, the affections, the sympathies, and desires of the human heart and human ambition that control the vote, and not the vote that controls them. And now you propose to try an "experiment" upon a community composed of your own fellow-citizens, which is in defiance of all human experience, all suggestions of philosophy, of your own laws, and of every lesson you should have drawn from every civilized nation that has preceded you.
Under the operation of this Amendment, what will become of the family hearthstone around which cluster the very best influences of human education? You will have a family with two heads—a "house divided against itself." You will no longer have that healthful and necessary subordination of wife to husband, and that unity of relationship which is required by a true and a real Christian marriage. You will have substituted a system of contention and difference warring against the laws of nature herself, and attempting by these new fangled, petty, puny, and most contemptible contrivances, organized in defiance of the best lessons of human experience, to confuse, impede, and disarrange the palpable will of the Creator of the world. I can see in this proposition for female suffrage the end of all that home life and education which are the best nursery for a nation's virtue. I can see in all these attempts to invade the relations between man and wife, to establish differences, to declare those to be two whom God hath declared to be one, elements of chaotic disorder, elements of destruction to all those things which are, after all, our best reliance for a good and a pure and an honest government.
As I said, Mr. President, I rose simply to express my astonishment that a measure of this kind could have received the assent which it apparently has received from the Senate of the United States in the vote just recorded. The subject is too broad, it is too deep, it is too serious to attempt to discuss it unprepared and within the time which is allotted to me. I sincerely hope that if this subject is to be acted upon, it will be after long, serious, severe, close consideration. Let all sides of the subject be viewed in all its vastness and far-reaching consequences. Let Senators consider the results, and let