No question in this country has been more ably discussed than this has been by the women themselves. I do not think a single objection which is made to woman suffrage is tenable. No one will contend but that women have sufficient capacity to vote intelligently. Sacred and profane history is full of the records of great deeds by women. They have ruled kingdoms, and, my friend from Georgia to the contrary notwithstanding, they have commanded armies. They have excelled in statecraft, they have shone in literature, and, rising superior to their environments and breaking the shackles with which custom and tyranny have bound them, they have stood side by side with men in the fields of the arts and the sciences.
If it were a fact that woman is intellectually inferior to man, which I do not admit, still that would be no reason why she should not be permitted to participate in the formation and control of the government to which she owes allegiance. If we are to have as a test for the exercise of the right of suffrage a qualification based upon. intelligence, let it be applied to women and to men alike. If it be admitted that suffrage is a right, that is the end of controversy; there can no longer be any argument made against woman suffrage; because, if it is her right, then, if there were but one poor woman in all the United States demanding the right it would be tyranny to refuse the demand.
But our opponents say that suffrage is not a right; that it is a matter of grace only; that it is a privilege which is conferred upon or withheld from individual members of society by society at pleasure. Society as here used means man's government, and the proposition assumes that men have a right to institute and control governments for themselves and for women. I admit that in the governments of the world, past and present, men as a rule have assumed to be the ruling class; that they have instituted governments from participation in which they have excluded women; that they have made laws for themselves and for women, and have themselves administered them. But, that the provisions conferring or regulating suffrage, in the constitutions and laws of governments so constituted, have determined the question of the vight of suffrage, can not be maintained.
Let us suppose, if we can, a community separated from all others —having no organized government, owing no allegiance to any existing governments, without any knowledge of the character of those present or past, so that when they come to form one for themselves they can do so free from the bias or prejudice of custom or education—a community composed of an equal number of men and women, having equal property rights to be defined and to be protected by law. When such community came to institute a government—and it would have an undoubted right to institute one for itself, and the instinct of self-preservation would soon lead it to do so—will my friend from Georgia tell me by what right, human or divine, the male portion could exclude the female portion, equal in number and having equal property rights, from participation in the formation of such government and in the enactment of its laws?