Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/538

510 the statesmen of our day—Seward, Sumner, Wade, Trumbull, Schurz, Thurman, Groesbeck, and Julian—to prove "that no just government can be formed without the consent of the governed"; that "the ballot is the columbiad of our political life, and every man who holds it is a full-armed Monitor." But what do lofty utterances and logical arguments avail so long as men, blinded by old prejudices and customs, fail to see their application to the women by their side? Alas! gentlemen, women are your subjects. Your own selfish interests are too closely interwoven for you to feel their degradation, and they are too dependent to reveal themselves to you in their nobler aspirations, their native dignity. Did Southern slaveholders ever understand the humiliations of slavery to a proud man like Frederick Douglass? Did the coarse, low-bred master ever doubt his capacity to govern the negro better than he could govern himself? Do cow-boys, hostlers, pot-house politicians ever doubt their capacity to prescribe woman's sphere better than she could herself? We have yet to learn that, with the wonderful progress in art, science, education, morals, religion, and government we have witnessed in the last century, woman has not been standing still, but has been gradually advancing to an equal place with the man by her side, and stands to-day his peer in the world of thought.

American womanhood has never worn iron shoes, burned on the funeral pile, or skulked behind a mask in a harem, yet, though cradled in liberty, with the same keen sense of justice and equality that man has, she is still bound by law in the swaddling bands of an old barbarism. Though the world has been steadily advancing in political science, and step by step recognizing the rights of new classes, yet we stand to-day talking of precedents, authorities, laws, and constitutions, as if each generation were not better able to judge of its wants than the one that preceded it. If we are to be governed in all things by the men of the eighteenth century, and the twentieth by the nineteenth, and so on, the world will be always governed by dead men. The exercise of political power by woman is by no means a new idea. It has already been exercised in many countries, and under governments far less liberal in theory than our own. As to this being an innovation on the laws of nature, we may safely trust nature at all times to vindicate herself. In England, where the right to vote is based on property and not person, the feme sole freeholder has exercised her right all along. In her earliest history we find records of decisions in courts of her right to do so, and discussions on that point by able lawyers and judges. The feme sole voted in person; when married, her husband represented her property, and voted in her stead; and the moment the breath went out of his body, she assumed again the burden of disposing of her own income and the onerous duty of representing herself in the Government. Thus England is always consistent; property being the basis of suffrage, is always represented. Here suffrage is based on "persons," and yet one-half our people are wholly unrepresented.

We have declared in favor of a government of the people, for the people, by the people, the whole people. Why not begin the experiment? If suffrage is a natural right, we claim it in common with all citizens; if