at least their aims in this matter be something higher than mere political and partisan considerations, which I fear have animated much of the discussion to which we have listened. Mr. President, I trust sincerely that the vote just taken, indicating the refusal of the Senate to lay this bill upon the table, may not indicate the will of the Senate in respect of this Amendment. We have no right to subject this or any other portion of our fellow-citizens to so sad, so untoward, so unhappy an experiment as is here proposed. I have sat in this Chamber, and seen laws leveled with the most serious and cruel penalties against a class of people practicing polygamy in our Territories. What will this law do? Will it not in fact sever those relations to which I have referred as being essential for the virtue and safety of a State? What is your State unless it is founded upon virtuous and happy homes? And where can there be a virtuous and happy home unless a Christian marriage shall have consecrated it?
No, Mr. President, I trust that this Amendment will not be adopted, that we shall not trifle in this way with the happiness of a large portion of our fellow-citizens, that we shall not set what I must consider this indecorous example of government; and I trust that the vote of the Senate most emphatically will stop here, and I trust stop permanently even the suggestion of granting the political franchise of voting to the women of America. They do not need it, sir. I can not, of course, speak for all, but I know that I can speak the sentiment of many when I say that to them the proposition is abhorrent to take them from the retirement where their sway is so admitted, so beneficent, so elevating, and to throw them into another sphere for which they are totally unfitted and where all that at present adorns and protects them must be taken away by the rough and vulgar contact with those struggles which men are much better fitted to meet. No, sir; the relations of the sexes as they exist to-day under the laws of this country have produced happy and stable government, or at least are not responsible for the evil features which we witness. The best protection for the women of America is in the respect and the love which the men of America bear to them. Every man conversant with the practical affairs of life knows that the fact, that the mere fact that it is a woman who seeks her rights in a court of justice alone gives her an advantage over her contestant which few men are able to resist, I would put it to any who has practiced law in the courts of this country; let him stand before a jury composed only of men, let the case be tried only by men; let all the witnesses be men; and the plaintiff or the defendant be a woman, and if you choose to add to that, even more unprotected than women generally are, a widow or an orphan, and does not every one recognize the difficulty, not to find protection for her rights, but the difficulty to induce the men who compose the juries of America to hold the balance of justice steadily enough to insure that the rights of others are not invaded by the force of sympathy for her sex? These are common every-day illustrations. They could be multiplied ad infinitum.
Mr. President, there never was a greater mistake, there never was a falser fact stated than that the women of America need any protection further than the love borne to them by their fellow-countrymen. Every right, every privilege, many that men do not attempt, many that men can not