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637 of the whole claim of woman. By her own request, it was not published.


 * —Ladies and gentlemen. I am told that the Times of to-day warns the women of this Convention that if they proceed in their crusade they will forfeit the protection of the men. Perhaps, before it is offered, the question had better be asked whether it is needed. I do not think that I should run the risk of much difference of opinion if I claimed, that nine men out of ten would not be able to defend their right to vote as logically as the lady who has just addressed us has defended her right to vote. I question whether one-quarter of what we call the men educated by the colleges, and in active life—the better education of the two—would be able, arrogating to themselves as they do a far greater political and civil capacity, to state the grounds of civil rights and responsibilities, to mark out the limits, to vindicate the advantages, and to analyze the bases on which these rest, as we have just had it done. If participation in civil rights is based on mind—as in this country we claim it to be—then certainly to-night we have no right to deny that the cause is gained, for the friend who has preceded me has left very little for any one to say; she has covered the whole ground.

In fact this question is a question of civilization, nothing less. The position of woman anywhere is the test of civilization. You need not ask for the statistics of education, of national wealth, or of crime; tell me the position of woman, and you answer the question of the nation's progress. Utah is barbarism; we need no evidence; we read it in the single custom that lowers the female sex. Wherever you go in history this is true. Step by step as woman ascends, civilization ripens. I warn the anxious and terrified that their first efforts should be to conquer their fears, for the triumph of this crusade is written as certain on the next leaf that turns in the great history of the race, as that the twentieth century will open.

The time was when a Greek dared not let his wife go out of doors, and in the old comic play of Athens, one of the characters says, "Where is your wife?" "She has gone out." "Death and furies! what does she do out?" Doubtless, if any "fanatic" had claimed the right of woman to walk out of doors, he would have been deemed crazy in Athens; had he claimed the right of a modest married woman to be seen out of doors it would have been considered fanaticism, and I do not know but that the Herald of that day would have branded him as an infidel. But spite of the anchored conservatism of others, women got out of doors and the country grew, and the world turned round, and so modern Europe has progressed. Now the pendulum swung one way, and now another, but woman has gained right after right until with us, to the astonishment of the Greek, could he see it—of the Turk, when he hears it—she stands almost side by side with man in her civil rights. The Saxon race has led the van. I trample underfoot contemptuously the Jewish—yes, the Jewish—ridicule which laughs at such a Convention as this; for we are the Saxon blood, and the first line of record that is left to the Saxon race is that line of Tacitus, "On all grave questions they consult their women." When the cycle of Saxondom is complete, when the Saxon element culminates in modern civilization, another Tacitus will record in the valley of the Mississippi, as he did in the valley of the Rhine, "On all grave questions they consult their women." The fact is, there is no use