Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/734

704 audience wants to vote. Some of you were saying to-day, in these very seats, coming here out of mere curiosity, to see what certain fanatics could find to say, "Why, I don't want any more rights; I have got rights enough." Many a lady, whose husband is what he ought to be, whose father is what fathers ought to be, feeling no want unsupplied, is ready to say, "I have all the rights I want." So the daughter of Louis Sixteenth, in the troublous time of 1791, when somebody told her that the people were starving in the streets of Paris, exclaimed, "What fools! I would eat bread first!" Thus wealth, comfort, and ease say, "I have rights enough." Nobody doubted it, madam! But the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter of toil, whose earnings are filched from her by the rum debts of a selfishness which the law makes to have a right over her, in the person of a husband. The question is not of you, it is of some friendless woman of twenty, standing at the door of the world, educated, capable, desirous of serving her time and her race, and saying, "Where shall I use these talents? How shall I earn bread?" And orthodox society, cabined and cribbed in St. Paul, cries out, "Go sew, jade! We have no other channel for you. Go to the needle, or wear yourself to death as a school-mistress." We come here to endeavor to convince you, and so to shape our institutions that public opinion, following in the wake, shall be willing to open channels for the agreeable and profitable occupation of women as much as for men. People blame the shirt-makers and tailors because they pay two cents where they ought to pay fifty. It is not their fault. They are nothing but the weathercocks, and society is the wind. Trade does not grow out of the Sermon on the Mount; merchants never have any hearts, they have only ledgers; two per cent. a month is their Sermon on the Mount, and a balance on the wrong side of the ledger is their demonstration. (Laughter). Nobody finds fault with them for it. Everything according to the law of its life. A man pays as much for making shirts or coats as it is necessary to pay, and he would be a fool and a bankrupt if he paid any more. He needs only a hundred workwomen; there are a thousand women standing at his door saying, "Give us work; and if it is worth ten cents to do it, we will do it for two"; and a hundred get the work, and nine hundred are turned into the street, to drag down this city into the pit that it deserves. (Loud applause).

Now, what is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat, and gibbet him in The New York Tribune? Not at all; it does the women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what is to be done. Behind the door at which those women stand asking for work, on one side stands an orthodox disciple of St. Paul, and on the other a dainty exquisite; and the one says, it is not religious, and the other says, it is not fashionable, for woman to be anything but a drudge. Now, strangle the one in his own creed, and smother the other in his own perfumes, and give to those thousand women freedom to toil. Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those thousand women may go out, and wherever they find work to do, do it, without a stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to use