Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/235

Rh Mr. : I desire to disclaim the meaning which the honorable senator seems to have put upon my words. I agree with him that the American governments have been the best on the face of the earth, but it is because of their adoption of that principle of equality more than any other government, the logical effect of which will compel them to yield the right prayed for to women, that they are the best. But still best as they are, I said, and mean to say, that the business of governing mankind has been the one business on the face of the earth which has been done most clumsily, which has been, even where most excellent, full of mistakes, expense, injustice, and wrong-doing. What I said was that I did not think the persons to whom that privileged function had been committed so far were entitled to claim any special superiority for the masculine intellect in the results which it had achieved.

To say that the governments, State and national, now in existence upon this continent are imperfect is but to announce the truism that everything made by man is necessarily imperfect. But I stand here to declare to-day that the governments of the States, and the national government, in theory, although failing sometimes in practice, are a standing monument to the genius and intellect of the men who created them. But the senator from Massachusetts was pleased to say further, that woman suffrage should obtain in this country in the interest of education. I permit not that senator to go further than myself in the line of universal public education. I have declared, over and over again, in every county in my State for the past ten years, that universal education should accompany universal suffrage, that the school-house should crown every mound in prairie and forest, that it was the temple of liberty and the altar of law and order.

I well remember that I was thrilled with the eloquence of the distinguished senator from Massachusetts at the last session of the last congress, when, upon a bill to provide for general education by a donation of the public lands, he so pathetically and justly described the mass of dark ignorance and illiteracy projected upon the people of the South under the policy of the Republican party, and the senator then stood here and said that the people of Massachusetts extended the public lands to relieve the people of the South from this monstrous burden. What does the senator propose to do to-day? He proposes with one stroke of the pen to double, and more than double, the illiterate suffrage of the United States. The senator says that one-half the people of the United States are represented in this measure of woman suffrage. I deny it, sir. If the senator means that the women of America, comprising one-half of the population, are interested in this measure, I deny it most emphatically and most peremptorily. Not one-tenth of them want it. Not one-tenth of the mothers and sisters and Christian women of this land want to be turned into politicians or to meddle in a sphere to which God and nature have not assigned them.

Sir, there are some ladies—and I do not intend to term them anything but ladies—who are zealously engaged in this cause, and they have flooded this hall with petitions, and have called their women's rights conventions