But these words are followed by others somewhat problematical, at least in the respect rendered to women:
As in a hundred years suffrage has extended its bounds till it now includes the whole population, in another hundred years everything will vote, unless it be the power of the loom, and the locomotive, and the watch, and I sometimes think, looking at these machines and their performances, that they too ought to vote.
But Mr. Evarts approached the close of his oration with these words—and may they not be prophetic—may not the orator have spoken with a deeper meaning than he knew?
With these proud possessions of the past, with powers matured, with principles settled, with habits formed, the nation passes as it were from preparatory growth to responsible development of character and the steady performance of duty. What labors await it, what trials shall attend it, what triumphs for human nature, what glory for itself, are prepared for this people in the coming century, we may not assume to foretell.
Whether the wise (?) legislators see it or not—whether the undercurrent that is beating to the shore speaks with an utterance that is comprehensible to their heavy apprehensions or not, the coming century has in preparation for the country a truer humanity, a better justice of which the protest and declaration of the fathers pouring its vital current down through the departed century, and surging on into the future, is, to the seeing eye, the sure forerunner, the seed-time, of which the approaching harvest will bring a better fruition for women—and they who scoff now will be compelled to rejoice hereafter. But as Mr. Evarts remarked in his allusions to future centennials:
By the mere circumstance of this periodicity our generation will be in the minds, in the hearts, on the lips of our countrymen at the next centennial commemoration in comparison with their own character and condition and with the great founders of the nation. What shall they say of us? How shall they estimate the part we bear in the unbroken line of the nation's progress? And so on, in the long reach of time, forever and forever, our place in the secular roll of the ages must always bring us into observation and criticism.
Shall it then be recorded of us that the demand and the protest of the women were not made in vain? Shall it be told to future generations that the cry for justice, the effort to sunder the shackles with which woman has been oppressed from the dim ages of the past, was heeded? Or, shall it be told of us, in the beginning of this second centennial, that justice has been ignored, that only liberty to men entered at this stage of progress, into the American idea of self-government? Freedom to men and women alike is but a question of time—is America now equal to the great occasion? Has her development expanded to that degree where her legislators can say in very truth, as of the colored man, "Let the oppressed go free"?
