—which was an inspiration and a prophecy—we looked to see all faltering and compromise, so fatal in all our past, so fatal always and everywhere, swept like dew before the sun.
But the old fears and falterings return sevenfold reinforced to renew a puerile and patch-work legislation, which, while asserting the truth, submits to, nay, invites a fresh struggle over each separate application of the same "self-evident truth.'" What remains for us, then, but to turn from a Congress from which we had hoped so much, which might bave dared anything in the interest of loyalty and justice, as our brave brethren turned, from a recreant President to the people, whom he and Congress have not dared to trust, and resolve to do our utmost to awaken a public sentiment which only slumbers, but is not dead, and which shall make impossible such burlesques, such infamous "amendments" to our organic law. With undiminished hope and faith, yours,
Dear Madam:—I learn by a circular I have received that a Woman's Rights Convention is to be held in New York in May. I can not have the pleasure of attending it, but I would like to take this opportunity of telling you I am with you, heart and soul, in this cause—of thanking you, and those with whom you are associated, for the noble work you have done, and are doing, in the cause of universal suffrage. There never was a more opportune time for calling a convention of this kind than the present, when it is evident that the United States Constitution is about to undergo some repairs—when the so-called radicals in Congress are trying to have it so altered as to insure the disfranchisement of one-half the nation. They have so strangely perverted the meaning of the term "universal suffrage," that it is a misnomer as at present used by them. It is rather significant of the "universality" of the suffrage intended, that every one of these special guardians of freedom refused to present Congress a petition for woman's enfranchisement; that the Massachusetts Senator who leads the van of freedom's host, did, finally, most reluctantly present it with one hand, while taking good care to deal it a blow with the other that would prove a most effectual quietus to it; that a representative [Mr. Boutwell], after repeating the self-evident truth that "there can be no just government without the consent of the governed," says that 'man is endowed by nature with the priority of right to the vote rather than woman or child;" that the two Senators from Massachusetts have each proposed amendments to the Constitution holding out inducements to the States to enfranchise all male inhabitants, but none to enfranchise women, when they could have included them by omitting one word; that that light of freedom, Mr. Greeley, of the Tribune, states that "men express the public sense as fully as if women voted" [speech in Suffield, Conn., last June}. These are a few of the straws pointing to that sham labeled "universal suffrage."
The conservatives of the slave-driving school have had an odious enough reputation, but I never heard of any of them taking measures to so amend the Constitution as to insure the perpetuation of the disfranchisement of sixteen millions of the nation, as would the proposed amendments of Messrs. Sumner and Wilson. And these Massachusetts Senators are called the foremost workers in the ranks of liberty's grand army. If these are the foremost, Heaven save us from those in the rear! Why does Mr. Boutwell try to make it appear that he believes that governments, to be founded on justice, should obtain "the consent of the governed," when he believes the consent of only one-half the governed should be obtained? when he classes adults as fully capable of exercising an enlightened judgment as himself with infants? If Mr. Greeley thinks it right for one-half the people to represent the wants, and speak as they may think best for the other half, that other half having no choice in the matter, he must admit, if he have a tithe of the sense of justice attributed to him, that it would be only fair to let each half take their turn—the men expressing the public sense a part of the time, then the women— thus alternating between the two, in order to balance the scales of justice with perfect equilibrium.
It seems rather a difficult matter for men to appreciate the fact that women are ordinary human beings, with the wants and reasoning faculties of the same. If women lived on the plane where sword and cannon are resorted to for the procuring of justice, men might then see the necessity of establishing equality of rights for all. But the power of