Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/271

Rh The prejudices of the 108 outweighed a!l the able arguments made by those who represented the petitioners, and all the great principles of justice on which a true republic is based.

We find the following comments on the character and duties of the gentlemen who composed the Convention, from the pen of Mr. Higginson, in The Una of June, 1853:

To the members of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention:

The publication in our newspapers of the list of members of your honorable body, has won the just tribute of men of all parties to the happy result of the selection. Never, it is thought, has Massachusetts witnessed a political assembly of more eminent or accomplished men. And yet there are those to whom the daring thought has occurred, that to convoke such ability and learning, only to decide whether our Legislature shall be hereafter elected by towns or districts, is somewhat like the course of Columbus in assembling the dignitaries of his nation to decide whether an egg could be best poised upon the larger or the smaller end. A question which was necessarily settled, after all, by a compromise, as this will be.

But at that moment, there lay within the brain of the young Genoese a dream. which although denounced by prelates and derided by statesmen. was yet destined to add another half to the visible earth; so there is brooding in the soul of this generation, a vision of the greatest of all political discoveries, which, when accepted, will double the intellectual resources of society, and give a new world, not to Castile and Leon only, but to Massachusetts and the human race.

And lastly, as we owe the labor and the laurels of Columbus only to the liberal statesmanship of a woman, it is surely a noble hope, that the future Isabellas of this Nation may point the way for their oppressed sisters of Europe to a suffrage truly universal, and a political freedom bounded neither by station nor by sex.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith, writing in The Una, says of this historical occasion:

The Massachusetts Convention did not deign to notice the prayer of these two thousand women who claimed the privilege of being heard by men who assert that we are represented through them. They decided that "it is inexpedient to act upon said petition." This is no cause for discouragement to those who have the subject at heart. Two thousand signers are quite as many, if not more, than we supposed would be procured. The believers in the rights of woman to entire equality with man in every department involving the question of human justice are entirely in the minority. The majority believe that their wives and mothers are household chattels; believe that they were expressly created for no other purposes than those of maternity in their highest aspect; in their next for purposes of passion, with the long retinue of unhallowed sensualities, debasements, and [sic]pollutions which follow in the train of evil indulgence.