Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/813

Rh and trouble of loading, but can't fire off. Now, I affirm, that it is wrong to give women the responsibilities of public life without giving them the safety of public life, too.

But what practical use will the ballot be to women? Tell me what practical use the ballot will be to men; then I will tell you of what use it will be to women. A man that denies the right of woman to the ballot must deny it to any body and all bodies. I affirm another thing. I affirm that the ballot is a natural right. To say that voting is an artificial thing is merely an evasion. If there is any such thing as natural rights in the world, it is the right of every person to have a voice in the government that he shall live under, and in the electing of the magistrate who shall make the laws by which he is to be governed. But they say women don't want to vote. Well, I didn't want to learn my letters, but I had to, and, on the whole, I am not sorry for it. If men say women don't want the ballot, my reply is, they need it, at any rate. In behalf of the poor and needy, I plead for suffrage. They are the persons who are in just that place where the hail of misfortune plays pitilessly upon them. I plead for suffrage for women, not because the rich and refined need it—they have already more than their heart could wish—but for the great sisterhood of common women.

But, it is said, is it not subverting the order of the Bible; is it not subverting those sound Christian maxims in respect to the subordination of woman to man? Well, if you think it is, let the husband vote first and the wife vote after; that settles that point. I have looked through the Ten Commandments, and although I find a great many things that you shall not do, I don't find anywhere it says that you shall not vote; and I don't think that there is a place in the Bible where it says that a woman shall not vote; nor, since it pleased God to make thousands and thousands of women that are superior to men, I don't believe that he ever wrote a line to say that a woman who was superior should be inferior. My friends, the true rendering of Scripture is this: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself. In the kingdom of love there is neither high nor low. Love knows no distinctions. It is all equal in the kingdom of God; and wherever the human family are supremely possessed by that one supreme, beneficent feeling of love, there never can arise these disturbing elements.

Mrs. said: Ladies and Gentlemen—Mr. Beecher very pertinently said that women are allowed to know, but not to say; they may make all the preparations necessary to intelligent voting, but that they shall not vote. That is exactly what is doing a vast deal of mischief the world over. If they are not allowed to vote, and express their opinions upon the laws by which they are to be governed, and if they are not to have opened to them all proper fields of labor, they will turn their attention to dressmaking, and to millinery, and to all the other hot-beds of our fast modern life. It is doing great harm; and that is one reason I earnestly plead in their behalf for the ballot. Men say women shall not have the ballot. They must petition and beg for it. Have not petitions been already made? Have not 200,000 names been sent in to Congress already? Then they say you must "organize;" and when that is done, and they find the country rocked as by a traveling[Pg 778] volcano, they then