Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/825

Rh that which is a right, the condition is altogether changed. I claim the right because it is God-given. We have in the advanced age of Christianity, those who do not believe in the use of physical force on any account whatever. They are non-resistants; but it will not be said that the vicious can be controlled by moral suasion. Society is not yet sufficiently Christianized for men not to demand of each other guarantees for the safety of each other's rights. Shall we who are in some sense the weaker sex have no guarantee for our rights?

Miss Beecher makes the point that men will give, if we ask them properly. The first asking of American women was not for themselves—not for their own account. They forgot themselves in their anxiety for poor oppressed slaves. They didn't know what they had lost through long ages, from not having exerted their own powers, and established their own responsibilities. But when they came to do that, they then asked themselves, "Where are our good right hands?" I sent petitions to Congress again and again, which I had gathered from my neighbors, in regard to the abolishment of slavery in the District of Columbia and in the territories; and I have sent numbers of them in regard to this question of woman suffrage. I sent many of them to Horace Greeley, and he sent me back word, "The only good that these things will do in Congress is to help the janitor to light the fires. They do good to the people perhaps, but they do no good otherwise." We might have petitioned until the crack of doom, before Congress would have broken the chain. Why should we not demand our right to the vote, when we reflect that one vote, cast in the State of Indiana, was the means of electing a man whose vote in Congress turned the scale, and enacted the "Fugitive Slave Law"—that law which put the collar upon every bondsman's neck, and branded him the property of every Southern master.

I admit the great responsibility of the ballot, and if we are true women, we shall assume it with a full appreciation of that responsibility, and a determination to do our whole duty in its exercise. The argument that many women do not desire the ballot reminds me of an old colored woman whom I met soon after the war. I said to her, "Some people say they think your people are really almost sorry that they have been made free; that they were more comfortable as slaves." She said, "Is it possible that any person thinks like that? Can it be that any colored person feels like that?" I said, "I have heard people say so." "Then," said she, "if anybody feels like that they deserve to be slaves—doubly slaves—slaves in this world and slaves in the next." The woman that is not willing to assume the responsibility of casting a vote upon a question that may decide whether in her individual neighborhood or precinct there shall be grog-shops and houses of prostitution open, and there shall be no proper care of the poor and needy and infirm—I say that if there is any woman who is not willing to assume such responsibilities, it seems to me that she must feel that it is a judgment on her, should her own husband or son or the daughter of her heart, or all of them, become sufferers in consequence of the evil that she might have stayed had she been willing to uphold the exercise of that right.

We ask only for the same right that is accorded to the poorest man landing on our shores. Is the giving of the ballot to a foreigner who comes among us a burden so great that he should not have it imposed upon him?