lican party at that time. It stands to-day a living monument of the grossest inconsistencies of which the Republican party ever was guilty.[1] ....
We can not play fast and loose with the eternal principle of justice without being caught sooner or later in the net of our own weaving. The legitimate results of the war have been all frittered away by political maneuvering. While Northern statesmen have made a football of the rights of 12,000,000 women as voters, and by Supreme Court decisions driven them from the polls, why arraign the men in the South for treating 1,000,000 freedmen in the same way? Are the rights of that class of citizens more sacred than ours? Are the violations of the fundamental principles of our Government in their case more dangerous than in ours?
In addressing those who already enjoy the right of suffrage, one naturally would suppose that it would not be necessary to enlarge on the advantages of having a voice in deciding the laws and the rulers under which one lives. And neither would it if each member of this committee understood that woman's wants and needs are similar to his own; that the cardinal virtues belong to her as well as to him; that personal dignity, the power of self-protection, are as important for her as for him; that woman loves justice, equality, liberty, and wishes the right to give her consent to the Government under which she lives, as much as man does. Matthew Arnold says: "The first desire of every cultured mind is to take part in the great work of government." ....
If we would rouse new respect for womanhood in the hearts of the masses, we must place woman in a position to respect herself, which she can never do as long as her political status is beneath that of the most degraded, ignorant classes of men. To make women the political equals of their sons, or even of their gardeners and coachmen, would add new dignity to their position; and to change our laws and constitutions in harmony with the new status would have its influence on the large class of young men now devoting themselves to the study of the law. Lord Brougham said long ago that the Common Law of England for women, and all the statutes based on such principles, were a disgrace to the Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century. Do you think our sons can rise from such studies with a high ideal of womanhood? And with what feelings do you suppose women themselves read these laws, and the. articles in the State constitutions, rating them with the disreputable and feeble-minded classes? (Can you not understand the dignity, the pride, the new-born self-respect which would thrill the hearts of the women of this nation in their enfranchisement? It would elevate their sphere of action and every department of labor in which they are occupied; it would give new force to their words as teachers, reformers and missionaries, new strength to their work as guardians of the young, the wayward and the unfortunate. It would transform them from slaves to sovereigns,- ↑ See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 464.
