Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/827

Rh soul also, declaring that I, in common with every other woman in this grand Republic, have a duty to the State that must not be ignored. In the home, and in the church, most women acknowledge they have duties—but as to the State they hesitate. Oh, if they would but "gather into the stillness," as the Friends say, and listen reverently to the voice within, I think they would often hear the solemn utterance, "These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone." Every woman who has tried to do her whole duty in the family, tried faithfully to make home a foretaste of heaven, with its abounding peace and love, tried with a mother's prayers, a mother's tears, a mother's unselfish, self-denying love, to train her darlings for the skies—every such woman deserves the gratitude of humanity, and that sweetest of rewards to a mother's heart, viz; that "her children shall rise up, and call her blessed;" while every woman who superadds to this unselfish devotion to home and children, a lifelong fidelity to the church in which she was reared, or has adopted; every woman who has worshiped devoutly at the shrine her own soul has accepted, following meekly in the footsteps of Him who went about doing good—every such woman deserves the wreath of immortal amaranths which angel hands are weaving for her brow—but more than all, she who crowns her home work and her religious endeavors with a service to the State, which of necessity touches the great questions of reform, and aids in the settling of vast problems wherein the weal or woe of a nation is concerned—that woman, from the centre of her individual responsibility, reaches out to the circumference of her individual influence, and desires to receive from the lips of the dear Lord himself, the "Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord"—the joy of a completed mission. The recording angel will write such a woman's name with that of Abou Ben Adhem, who loved his fellows, and in serving humanity served God.

The single point which I wish to present to the women before me at this hour and in these brief remarks is this, then; that it is your solemn, sacred duty, as you love God and the truth, and human welfare, to seek the ballot, and, having obtained it, to use it in purifying our statute-books and making them read more like the oracles of God—the eleven Commandments, and the Golden Rule.

Mrs., of New Jersey, observed that in a court room of New York, a lawyer—she understood—recently stated that according to law the husband of a woman has such control over her as to "own" her; that man was made for God and woman for man! She asked if those present accepted that law [A voice, No!] Do you, said she, own your own persons, according to the law of God, or do you not? Our brothers tell us that women would be contaminated by going into the court rooms and sitting on juries; that women must be kept from these places because it would impair their delicacy. Well, if women were wholly excluded from our court rooms the case would be different. But when in the mornings we take up the daily papers, how frequently do we read of some poor young creature who has been arrested and taken to the court room, to be tried by a jury of men; and carried perhaps from there to a place of imprisonment, with no pitying woman's eye or heart or hand to give her a ray of comfort. And these poor, forlorn creatures shall be deprived of our sympathy and left to perish because