Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/982

and no disturbance comes of it—he is neither fined nor confined. So, it would seem, "a little voting is a dangerous thing."

Say what you will, the whole question of woman's status in the State and the Church, in society and the family, is full of absurd contradictions and monstrous anomalies. We are so responsible, yet irresponsible—we are idols, we are idiots—we are everything, we are nothing. We are the Caryatides, rearing up the entablature of the temple of liberty we are never allowed to enter. We may plot against a government, and hang for it; but if we help to found and sustain a government by patriotic effort and devotion, by toil and hardship, by courage, loyalty, and faith, by the sacrifice of those nearest and dearest to us, and then venture to clutch at the crumbs that fall from the table where our Masters Jonathan, Patrick, Hans, and Sambo sit at feast, you arrest us, imprison us, try us, fine us, and then add injury to insult, by calling us old, ugly, and fanatical.

One is forcibly reminded of the sermon of the colored brother on woman, the heads of which discourse were: "Firstly. What am woman? Secondly. Whar did she come from? Thirdly. Who does she belong to? Fourthly. Which way am she gwine to?"

The law and the Gospel have settled the "secondly" and "thirdly." Woman came from man, and belongs to him by the mortgage he holds on her through that spare-rib; but "firstly" and "fourthly" remain as profound and unsolvable questions as they were before the Ethiopian divine wrestled with them. But perhaps this troublous and perplexed existence is our "be-all and end-all"; that in the life beyond, man may foreclose that old mortgage and re-absorb woman into his glorified and all-sufficient being.

I have never believed with Miss Anthony, that the XIV. Amendment was going to help us. I have never accepted certain other of her theories; but I believe in and accept her as a woman of intense convictions, of high courage and constancy; and I don't like to hear her ridiculed and abused. If anything can make me think meanly of my young brothers of the press, it is the way they pelt and pester Susan B. Anthony. For shame, boys! Never a one of you will make the man she is. Even some of our Washington editors turn aside from the fair game. Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, has provided for them in the Board of Public Works, to vent their virtuous indignation and manly scorn of the woman they are determined shall stand in perpetual pillory in the market-place of this great, free Republic.—New York Times.

The Washington, D. C., Star says of Judge Hunt's opinion: "If his views are to prevail, of what effect are the suffrage amendments to the Federal Constitution."

 

[The County Post, Washington Co., N. Y., Friday, June 27, 1873].

NOT A VOTER.

The United States Courts have pronounced on Miss Anthony's case, which she so adroitly made by voting last fall, in company with fourteen others of her sex. The decision was adverse to the claim made by this devoted friend of female suffrage, that as the Constitution now stood, women had a right to vote. Accordingly the indomitable old lady was found guilty of violating the law regulating the purity of the ballot-box, and fined one hundred dollars and costs. A good many journals seem to regard this as a good joke on Susan B, as they call her, and make it the excuse for more poor jokes of their own. It may be stupid to confess it, but we can not see where the laugh comes in. If it is a mere question of who has got the best of it, Miss Anthony is still ahead; she has voted, and the American Constitution has survived the shock. Fining her one hundred dollars does not rub out that fact that fourteen women voted, and went home, and the world jogged on as before. The decision of the judge does not prove that it is wrong for women to vote, it does not even prove that Miss Anthony did wrong in voting. It only shows that one judge on the bench differs in opinion from other equally well qualified judges off the bench. It is not our province to find fault with this decision of the United States Court at Rochester. Miss Anthony may be wrong in attempting to vote; of that we are not certain. But of the greater question back of it, of Miss Anthony's inherent right to vote we have no question, and that after all is the more important matter. This Rochester breakwater may damn back the stream for a while, but it is bound to come, sweeping away all barriers. The opposition to extending the suffrage to the other sex is founded alone on prejudice arising from social custom. Reason