Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/833

Rh hast thy little allotments. The French must be thy classics, the house accounts thy mathematics. Patchwork, cooking, and sweeping thy mechanics; dress and embroidery thy fine arts. See how small the spheres. Do not venture outside of it, nor teach thy daughters, when thou shalt have such to do so."

And so we women, from generation to generation, are drilled to be the apes of an artificial standard, made for us and imposed upon us by an outsider; a being who, in this attitude, becomes our natural enemy.

Mrs. said: There have always been good and able men ready to second us, and to say their best words for our cause. Among the first of these is Mr. George William Curtis, whom I have now the pleasure to introduce.

Ladies and Gentlemen:—It is pleasant to see this large assembly, and this generous spirit, for it is by precisely such meetings as this that public opinion is first awakened, and public action is at last secured. Our question is essentially an American question. It is a demand for equal rights, and will therefore be heard. Whenever a free and intelligent people asks any question involving human rights or liberty or development, it will ask louder and louder until it is answered. The conscience of this nation sits in the way like a sphinx, proposing its riddle of true democracy. Presidents and parties, conventions, caucuses, and candidates, failing to guess it, are remorselessly consumed. Forty years ago that conscience asked, "Do men have fair play in this country?" A burst of contemptuous laughter was the reply. Louder and louder grew that question, until it was one great thunderburst, absorbing all other questions; and then the country saw that its very life was bound up in the answer; and, springing to its feet, alive in every nerve, with one hand it snapped the slave's chain, and with the other welded the Union into a Nation—the pledge of equal liberty.

That same conscience sits in the way to-day. It asks another question, "Do women have fair play in this country?" As before, a sneer or a smile of derision may ripple from one end of the land to the other; but that question will swell louder and louder, until it is answered by the ballot in the hands of every citizen, and by the perfect vindication of the fundamental principle, that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." By its very nature, however, the progress of this reform will differ from every other political movement. Behind every demand for the enlargement of the suffrage, hitherto there was always a threat. It involved possible anarchy and blood. But this reform hides no menace. It lies wholly in the sphere of reason. It is a demand for justice, as the best political policy; an appeal for equality of rights among citizens as the best security of the common welfare. It is a plea for the introduction of all the mental and moral forces of society into the work of government. It is an assertion that in the regulation of society, no class and no interest can be safely spared from a direct responsibility. It encounters, indeed, the most ancient traditions, the most subtle sophistry of men's passions and prejudices. But there was never any great wrong righted that was not intrenched in sophistry—that did not plead an immemorial antiquity, and what it called the universal consent and "instinct" of mankind.

I say that the movement is a plea for justice, and I assert that the equal