Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/731

701 strong arm, adapt its task to its powers—that is the will of High Heaven. Wherever there are well-trained powers, let these be recognized powers, and of course the general results can not be otherwise than happy.

In regard to the great question who shall take the lead in the family or the community, let me say, that I do not care through what medium wisdom may reach me, through what medium I may secure the benefit of healthful guidance. What I want is wisdom. Wisdom, goodness, and power are the soul of all government. Wherever these are combined, there you have the results of wisdom, goodness, and power. Now, then, if the mother in a household, or even if a daughter in a household, is more distinguished for these high qualities, for these grand attainments, than any other member of that family, why, it is nothing but rebellion against God, it is nothing but gibbering madness, that would make any member of that family hesitate to avail himself of the guidance thus offered, of the light of the wisdom which may thus be poured around him. In God's name, give me wisdom, give me genuine power, give me magnanimity!—as to the incidents of the matter, I do not insist upon them. Whether it be through my father or my mother that true guidance is afforded, whether it be by my wife or my daughter that good counsel is offered, very clearly, to reject these is to spurn the kindness of benignant Heaven.

said:—We are here to enforce, on the consideration of the civil state, those elements of power which have already made the social state. You do not find it necessary to-day to say to a husband, "Your wife has a right to read"; or necessary to say to Dickens, "You have as many women over your pages as men." You do not find it necessary to say to the male members of a church that the women members have a right to change their creed. All that is settled; nobody contests it. If a man stood up here and said, "I am a Calvinist, and therefore my wife is bound to be one," you would send him to a lunatic asylum. You would say, "Poor man! don't judge him by what he says; he don't mean it." But law is halting back just where that old civilization was; we want to change it.

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanaticism about it. We are merely extending the area of liberty—nothing else. We have made great progress. The law passed at the last session of the New York Legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You can not stop with an inconsistent statute-book. A man is uneasy who is inconsistent. As Thomas Fuller says, "You can not make one side of the face laugh, and the other cry!" You can not have one-half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian; one-half of the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have granted that woman may be hung, therefore you must grant that woman may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed, therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation—and this is, in fact, all that we claim—the whole of it.

Now, I want to consider some of the objections that are made to this claim. Men say, "Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know enough; she has not sense enough to vote." I take this idea of the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim, for this reason, because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under republican institutions. The rule of despotism is that one class is made