sublime phenomena to be interpreted to us. From the Government, the civilization, and religion of Great Britain, we derived our chattel slave system; but it survived the pen of Jefferson, the sword of Washington, and the wisdom, humanity, and statesmanship of the founders and framers of the Government; and until far louder thunders than Bunker Hill and Saratoga dashed it to the ground, and almost whelmed the Government itself with it in a common ruin. And the terrible lessons of the late war will all be in vain, should we now attempt to relay our foundations in injustice and oppression. Out of the jaws of rebellion and treason was the nation snatched by the hand of negro valor. And thus, surely, has that race earned the right of full citizenship and equality in the State. Even Jefferson declared, more than half a century ago, that whoever "fights and pays taxes" has the right of suffrage against the world. But the right of humanity, of manhood, is older and of higher and diviner appointment than any other. If the right of liberty and the pursuit of happiness be the gift and endowment of the Creator, then surely is the right to the ballot the only possible or conceivable assurance and guaranty of it in republican governments. And on this ground the claim of woman is no less than that of man. But base and degrading as has been the position of the negro in the Government, that of woman is far lower. At no price within human power to pay, can she arrive at equality in the Government she is compelled to support and obey. In the making or executing of no law, however deeply her womanly interest or happiness may be involved, can she bear a part. She is found guilty, not of a crime, not of a color, but of a sex; and all her appeals to courts or communities for equality and justice, are in vain, even in this democratic and Christian Republic. She is a native, free-born citizen, a property-holder, taxpayer, loyal and patriotic. She supports herself, and in proportionable part, the schools, colleges, universities, churches, poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government; and yet she has no vote at the polls, no voice in the national councils. She has guided great movements of philanthropy and charity; has founded and sustained churches; established missions; edited journals; written and published invaluable treatises on history and economy, political, social, and moral, and on philosophy in all its departments; filled honorably professors' chairs; governed nations; led armies; commanded ships; discovered and described new planets; practiced creditably in the liberal professions; and patiently explored the whole realm of scientific research; and yet, because in life's allotment she is female, not male, woman, not man, the curse of inferiority cleaves to her through all her generations. Eden's anathema was to be removed on the coming of the second Adam; and in the new dispensation there was to be neither male nor female. Jewish outlawry from all the nations, continuing through almost twenty centuries, is repealed by common consent among all civilized governments. Nor does the curse of eternal attainder longer blast the Ethiopian race to degradation and slavery, through Canaan's sin and shame. But where shall woman look for her redemption in this auspicious hour, when new dawnings of liberty, new sunrises of human enfranchisement are illumining the world? A man once said, "where liberty is, there is my country." But on what continent or island, or in what vast wilderness shall woman find a nationality where she shall be taxed to support no government she did not aid in making, obey no law she did not help to enact, nor suffer any penalty until adjudged, by a jury, in part at least, of her peers? True, her privileges in some States have been, after long struggle and conflict, enlarged and increased. Like the Southern freedmen, she has had her Civil Rights bill. But all this is compatible with the Dred Scott decision itself. The power that gives can take away; but of that power woman is no part. Mr. Sumner says, "The ballot is the one thing needful to the emancipated slave." Without it, he declares, his liberty is but an illusion, a jack-o'lantern which he will pursue in vain. Without the ballot, he reiterates, the slave becomes only sacrifice. And shall it not also be pre-eminently so with woman? Formed by Almighty power a little lower than the angels, her ruling lords and masters have, by legislative proscription, plunged her not a little but immeasurably below myriads of the human race, whose only boast or claim is, that for some inscrutable reason they were so constituted as to stand men in the tables of the census.
In the American Equal Rights Association, it is determined to prosecute an agitation which shall wake the nation to new consciousness of the injustice long inflicted and still