Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/980

942 tion. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose parricidal hands were at the throat of our Nation. I recall but one instance in which I was ever reconciled to profanity. It was when, during the war, I was witnessing a heated conversation between a patriotic Republican and a rabid secession Democrat. The Republican was arguing that the Government should put forth all its powers to suppress the rebellion. At this stage the Democrat thrust in the stereotyped rebel phrase: "but only according to the Constitution." This interruption provoked the Republican to exclaim, as he hurried on, "Damn the Constitution!" The oath so happily helped to express my own feeling that I had no more heart to censure it than the recording angel had to preserve the record of Uncle Toby's famous oath.

And now, in your case, is another wrongful use of the Constitution. The instrument is cited against woman, as if she had united with man in making it, and was, therefore, morally bound by the flagrant usurpation, and legally concluded by it. Moreover, an excuse for turning the Constitution against her is that doing so deprives her of nothing but the pastime of dropping in a box a little piece of paper. Nevertheless, this dropping, inasmuch as it expresses her choice of the guardians of her person and property, is her great natural right to provide for the safety of her life and of the means to sustain it. She has no rights whatever, and she lives upon mere privileges and favors, if others may usurp her rights. In fact she lies at the mercy of men, if men only may choose into whose hands to put the control of her person and property. . . . I do not complain of Judge Hunt's interpretations of the Constitution on the suffrage question. I do not complain of his refusing to accept the constitutional recognition of woman's right to vote, though that right seems to lie on the very surface of the Constitution amongst her rights of citizenship. Nor do I complain of his passing by this recognition to dig down into the Constitution for proofs of there being two kinds of citizens—one that can vote and one that can not vote. What I complain of is that he did not hold as void, instead of arguing them to be valid, any words in the instrument which seemed to him to favor the disfranchisement of woman and consequent robbery and destruction of her rights. What I complain of is that, instead of his conscientious regard for his oath, he was not prepared to ignore and scout all human law so far as it is antagonistic to natural law and natural rights. . ..

How striking and instructive is the following extract from a speech made a year or two ago in the Spanish Parliament: "Natural rights dwell essentially in the individual, and are derived directly from his own moral nature. They are therefore, so to speak, unlegislatable, since they do not arise from the law, do not depend on the law, and, not depending on the law, can not be abrogated by the law. Born of the organic constitution of the individual, with the individual they live and die, unless a tyrannical, unrighteous, and iniquitous law tears them from him, and then he will have the right to protest forever against this wrong and the iniquity of the law, and to rise against it whenever he can. Well, my lords, the inalienable rights of the Cubans have been torn from them by unrighteous, tyrannical, and iniquitous laws." Would that Judge Hunt and all our judges might, ere long, take the ground of this sublimely eloquent Spaniard, that natural rights are "unlegislatable". . . . Would that my much esteemed friend, Judge Hunt, had so far outgrown bad law and grown into good law, as to have pronounced at your trial the disenthralment of woman, and thus have set the name of Hunt in immortality by the side of the names of Brougham and Mansfield, and others who have had the wisdom and the courage to thrust aside false paper law and install in its place that sovereign law which is written upon the heart and upon the very foundations of human being! He does not doubt that they did right. He honors them for having done as they did. Nor can he doubt that to deny to woman all part in the making and executing of laws under which her life and property may be taken from her is a crime against her, which no paper law can sanction and which God's law must condemn.... This worship of the Constitution!—how blinding and belittling! I would that every judge who tends to this weakness (and nearly every judge, yes, and nearly every other person tends to it) might find his steps arrested by the warning example of Daniel Webster. This pre-eminently intellectual man, whom nature had fitted to soar in the high sphere of absolute and everlasting law, had so shrivelled his soul by his worship of the Constitution that he came,