Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/314

292 to an equal protection of them with all other men; and since government is that protection, right reason and experience alike demand that every person shall have a voice in the government upon perfectly equal and practicable terms; that is, upon terms which are not necessarily and absolutely insurmountable by any part of the people.

Now these terms can not rightfully be arbitrary. But the argument of the honorable gentleman from Schenectady, whose lucid and dignified discourse needs no praise of mine, and the arguments of others who have derived government from society, seemed to assume that the political people may exclude and include at their pleasure; that they may establish purely arbitrary tests, such as height, or weight, or color, or sex. This was substantially the squatter sovereignty of Mr. Douglas, who held that the male white majority of the settlers in a territory might deprive a colored minority of all their rights whatever; and he declared that they had the right to do it. The same right that this Convention has to hang me at this moment to that chandelier, but no other right. Brute force, sir, may do anything; but we are speaking of rights, and of rights under this Government, and I deny that the people of the State of New York can rightfully, that is, according to right reason and the principles of this Government derived from it, permanently exclude any class of persons or any person whatever from a voice in the Government, unless it can be clearly established that their participation in political power would be dangerous to the State; and, therefore, the honorable gentleman from Kings was logically correct in opposing the enfranchisement of the colored population, upon the ground that they were an inferior race, of limited intelligence, a kind of Chimpanzee at best. I think, however, sir, the honorable and scholarly gentleman—even he—will admit, that at Pillow, at Milliken's Bend, at Fort Wagner, the Chimpanzees did uncommonly well; yes, sir, as gloriously and immortally as our own fathers at Bunker Hill and Saratoga. "There ought to be no pariahs," says John Stuart Mill, "in a full grown and civilized nation; no persons disqualified except through their own default.... Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny." "No arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory in which any person or class is peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not open to all persons of full age who desire it." (Rep. G., p. 167.) And Thomas Hare, one of the acutest of living political thinkers, says that in all cases where a woman fulfills the qualification which is imposed upon a man, "there is no sound reason for excluding her from the parliamentary franchise. The exclusion is probably a remnant of the feudal law, and is not in harmony with the other civil institutions of the country. There would be great propriety in celebrating a reign which has been productive of so much moral benefit by the abolition of an anomaly which is so entirely without any justifiable foundation." (Hare, p. 280.)

The Chairman of the Committee asked Miss Anthony, the other evening, whether, if suffrage was a natural right, it could be denied to children. Her answer seemed to me perfectly satisfactory. She said simply, "All that we ask is an equal and not an arbitrary regulation. If you have the right, we