Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/342

318 Then, again, when men have devoted their lives to one reform, there is a natural feeling of pride, as well as an earnest principle, in seeing that one thing accomplished. Hence, in criticising such good and noble men as Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips for their apathy on woman's enfranchisement at this hour, it is not because we think their course at all remarkable, nor that we have the least hope of influencing them, but simply to rouse the women of the country to the fact that they must not look to these men as their champions at this hour. While philosophy and science alike point to woman as the new power destined to redeem the world, how can Mr. Smith fail to see that it is just this we need to restore honor and virtue in the Government? There is sex in the spiritual as well as the physical, and what we need to-day in government, in the world of morals and thought, is the recognition of the feminine element, as it is this alone that can hold the masculine in check.

Again; Mr. Smith refuses to sign the petition because he thinks to press the broader question of "universal suffrage" would defeat the partial one of "manhood suffrage"; in other words, to demand protection for woman against her oppressors, would jeopardize the black man's chance of securing protection against his oppressors. If it is a question of precedence merely, on what principle of justice or courtesy should woman yield her right of enfranchisement to the negro? If men can not be trusted to legislate for their own sex, how can they legislate for the opposite sex, of whose wants and needs they know nothing? It has always been considered good philosophy in pressing any measure to claim the uttermost in order to get something. Being in Ireland at the time of the Repeal excitement, we asked Daniel O'Connell one day if he expected to secure a repeal of the Union. "Oh, no!" said he, "but I claim everything that I may be sure of getting something." But their intense interest in the negro blinded our former champions so that they forsook principle for policy, and in giving woman the cold shoulder raised a more deadly opposition to the negro than any we had yet encountered, creating an antagonism between him and the very element most needed to be propitiated in his behalf. It was this feeling that defeated "negro suffrage" in Kansas.

But Mr. Smith abandons the principle clearly involved, and intrenches himself on policy. He would undoubtedly plead the necessity of the ballot for the negro at the south for his protection, and point us to innumerable acts of cruelty he suffers to-day. But all these things fall as heavily on the women of the black race, yea far more so, for no man can ever know the deep, the damning degradation to which woman is subject in her youth, in helplessness and poverty. The enfranchisement of the men of her race, Mr. Smith would say, is her protection. Our Saxon men have held the ballot in this country for a century, and what honest man can claim that it has been used for woman's protection? Alas! we have given the very hey day of our life to undoing the cruel and unjust laws that the men of New York had made for their own mothers, wives, and daughters.

As to the "rights of races," on which so much stress is laid just now, we have listened to debates in anti-slavery conventions, for twenty years or more, and we never heard Gerrit Smith plead the negro cause on any lower ground than his manhood; his individual, inalienable right to freedom and equality;