have opposed us. We have stood before powers and dignitaries to maintain what we believe; and while we have asked that the right of suffrage be recognized in the persons of women, women learned and unlearned have stood up to ask that our petition should not be granted. We need not say that for one woman who has done this, hundreds and thousands have risen up to bless the woman suffrage cause and its champions. And for every doctor, lawyer and priest who has shrieked forth or set forth our presumptive disabilities, a tenfold number of men in all of these callings have arisen to do battle for the right, and to tell us on the authority of their special knowledge and experience, that the reform we ask for is congenial to nature and founded on right. Goldwin Smith, a man knowing naught of woman, airs his irrational views in the English Fortnightly, and Frances Power Cobbe and Prof. Cairnes, and a host of others, unravel the net of his flimsy statements. Drs. Clarke and Maudsley dogmatize from their male view of the female constitution; and from men and women throughout the country an indignant protest rises up. Men and women say alike: "It is not education that demoralizes and diseases our women. It is want of education, want of object, want of right knowledge of ends and methods." And how shall we acquire this unless we are taught? And how shall we be taught unless provision is made for us? And how shall provision be made for us unless we make it ourselves by voting for it?
Some mention is due to the place in which we meet. We are in the State of Michigan, a State in which the question of impartial suffrage has been carefully canvassed and presented during the past year. Within a short distance from us is the University of Michigan, liberal to men and to women, whose scholarly claims and merits its Professors and its President openly and earnestly attest. We claim that institution as our potent ally. It furnishes the remedy to all that we complain of. Equal education for the sexes is the true preparation for equality in civil and social ordinances. Even at this distance we breathe something of that pure air in which the woman grows to her full intellectual stature, untrammeled by artificial limitation of object and of method. We boast our own Boston, its culture and its conscience, but while Harvard persistently closes its doors to women, we blush too for New England, and sorrowfully wish it better enlightenment and better behavior.
Having spoken of the East and the West, let me say how welcome to us of the East are occasions which make us better acquainted with our fellow-workers and believers of the West. The late Mr. Seward once said that slavery was sectional and freedom National. This was true in a larger sense than that in which he said it. All that is slavish tends to keep up sectional prejudice and isolation. All that is liberal tends to sympathy and union. East and West are the two hands of this mighty country—let the harmony of the present occasion show that they have but one heart between them. Are not all our chief possessions held in common? We gave you Sumner and you gave us Lincoln. We fought together the war of our late enfranchisement, and when God shall give us impartial suffrage as an established fact, it will be hard to discriminate between our work and yours. But the two hands will then be clasped, and the one heart uplifted with a throb of thankfulness that shall make our whole Nation one, and that forever. For the present moment, while we workers for woman suffrage can make no boast as to the final adoption of our method, we can yet rejoice in the results which already crown our work. Christ, in the very infancy of his mission, looked abroad and saw the fields already white with the harvest.
The different agencies employed by this and kindred associations have plowed and furrowed the land far and near. They have dropped everywhere the seed of a true word, of a right feeling. How small a thing may this dropping of a seed seem to a careless observer! Yet it is the very life of the world which the patient farmer sows and reaps. So, our laborious meetings and small measures; our speeches, soon forgotten; our writings, soon dismissed; our petitions to Legislatures, never entertained; all these seem small things to do. The world says: "Why do you not labor to build up fortunes and reputations for yourselves if you will labor? Why do you waste your time and efforts on this ungrateful soil?" But we may reply that we have the joy of Christ in our hearts. In every furrow, some seed springs up; from every effort, some sympathy, some conviction results. When we look about us and see the number of suffrage associations formed in the different States, we too can say that the fields are white already to harvest.