Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/249

Rh to the worn-out garment of Republicanism, which they patched with Mahoneism in Virginia, with repudiation elsewhere, and which they now seek to patch further by putting on the delicate little silk covering of woman suffrage. I do not believe that this movement has its root and branch in any sincere desire to give to the women of this land the right of suffrage. I think it is a mere party movement with a view of attempting to draw into the reach of the Republican party some little support from the sympathy and interest they suppose the ladies will take in their cause if they should advocate it here. No bill, perhaps, is expected to be reported. The committee will sit and listen and profess to be charmed and enlightened and instructed by what may be said, and then the subject will be passed by without any actual effort to secure the passage of a bill.

Introduce your bills and let them go to the Judiciary Committee, where the rights of men are to be considered as well as the rights of women. If this subject is of that pressing national importance which senators seem to think it is, it is not to be supposed that the Committee on the Judiciary will fail to give it profound and early attention. When you bring a select committee forward under the circumstances under which this is to be raised, you must not expect us to give credit generally to the idea that the real purpose is to advance the cause of woman suffrage, but rather that the real purpose is to advance the cause of political domination in this country. I can see no reason for the raising of this select committee, unless it be to furnish some senator, as I have remarked, with a clerk and messenger. If that were the avowed reason or could even be intimated, I think I should be disposed to yield that courtesy to the senator, whoever he might be; but I cannot do it under the false pretext that the real object is to bring forward measures here for the introduction of woman suffrage into the District of Columbia, where we have no suffrage, or into the territories, where they have all the suffrage that the territorial legislatures see proper to give them. I therefore shall oppose the resolution.

Mr. : I move the that Senate proceed to the consideration of executive business. [The motion was agreed to.]

, 1882.

Mr. : I now ask for the consideration of the resolution relating to a select committee on woman suffrage.

The pro tempore: There being ten minutes left of the morning hour, the senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Hoar] asks for the consideration of the resolution relating to woman suffrage. The pending question is on the motion of the senator from Delaware [Mr. Bayard] to refer the subject-matter to the Committee on the Judiciary, on which the yeas and nays have been ordered. The principal legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.

Mr. (when Mr. Pugh's name was called): I was requested by the senator from Alabama [Mr. Pugh] to announce his pair with the senator from New York [Mr. Miller].

The roll-call was concluded.