Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/880

846 child of a woman. Yet not one woman's vote has ever been given to legalize the sale of ardent spirits, that have maddened the brain of her child. No woman's vote ever sanctioned the rum-seller's bar, at which her husband has bartered away his manhood, and made himself more vile than the brutes that perish.

Shall I be answered that woman's home influence must keep her children and her husband in the paths of virtue and honor? What! disfranchised woman—made by her law-maker an appendage to himself, her intellect shackled, her labor underrated, her physical power dwarfed and enfeebled by custom—is she expected to do this mighty thing? I hear again an answer—"Woman is responsible for the moral atmosphere that surrounds her." Is this indeed so? Men have taken from her every power to protect herself, even the dignity and respect which the right of suffrage confers upon the lowest man in the community, and which makes his opinion worth its price among men, is denied her. Men are in the daily habit of indulging in immoralities and vices, while they enjoin it upon woman—"poor, frail, weak woman," as they call us—to destroy the influence they have created. They place the temptation before the child, then sternly demand of its suffering mother her vigilance and care to control the appetite, which he has, it may be, inherited from his fathers, back from the third and fourth generation. Perchance, even through her own breast, he has sucked the poison that is corrupting all the streams of his young life. She may have grappled with the tempter, and come off conqueror; but can she hold him, the drunkard's child—the drunkard's grandchild—with the twofold curse upon his brow, while men place this direful temptation ever within his reach, glaring out upon him in beautiful enticement at every corner of the street, and at every turn of his daily and nightly walks, and add their influence and example to draw him away from the counsels of a mother's love, and the endearments of home? Then, when, under the influence of men, he outrages society, and in his maniac madness violates the law of the land, and becomes a felon, wasting away his days in the gloomy prison, or expiating his crimes upon the gallows, they forget what they have done, and, turning to the poor, crushed, and bleeding heart, which they have pierced with a thousand sorrows, cry out, "You, O mother of that guilty man, have not done your duty, and society holds you responsible for all his suffering and for all his crimes. O God! is this not adding insult to injury? How can the weak control the strong? How can the servant, bound hand and foot by the master, do the bidding of the tyrant? But all men are not weak—all men are not oppressive—all men are not unjust. There is a strong force, ever in the field of battle, struggling for truth and right with earnest heart and firm resolve. Let us arouse, O my sisters, and add our strength to theirs. The time is coming, aye, now is, when we must shake off our dependence and inactivity, and live more true to ourselves; when we must refuse to live the wives of drunkards, perpetuating, as mothers, their vices and crimes, to pollute society.

Let us unite with the good and true among men, that our efforts may overcome the legions who have hitherto conquered on the side of wrong, and raise high the standard of love and humanity, where falsehood and hate have ruled rampant. Let every woman, everywhere, speak out her bold, free thought on the subject of temperance; and while we plead with our rulers to deliver our husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers from the temptations to sin, let us demand with earnestness the right hereafter to protect ourselves; that we may redeem ourselves from the unjust law that now taxes every woman, without her own consent, according to her property or ability to labor, to pay her proportion for the support of vice and crime—that hereafter, when such great moral questions are under public discussion, and we, as one-half of the people, send up our petitions to our law-makers for a redress of wrongs, or an abatement of evils, our voice of pleading shall not be spurned by the heartless sneer, "They are only women, and the voice of a woman can not affect us at the polls, or disturb the course of our political parties. What care we for her progress or her wrongs?" Thus have we too often been answered, and shall be again, if we do not prove worthy of the chaplet of freedom, by winning it for ourselves. Let us then unite heart and hand in this great temperance reform—laying aside all local animosities, all sectional prejudices and sectarian jealousies—and, as it were, with one voice and one spirit, take hold of the work before us, resolved, if we fail to-day, to rise with renewed energy to-morrow, and "Never give up!" be our motto, till,