Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/432

Rh question," dragging it out to daylight again, that we might see how easily he could bury it fifty fathoms deep—with mud. It reminded me of Robert Laird Collier's sermon, "The Folly of the Woman Movement," in its logic and its spirit. Mr. Collier and our Mr. Holmes see but one thing in all this struggle for truth and justice, and that is "free-love." Here are some specimens of Mr. Holmes' assertions:

The advocates of woman's rights want, not the ballot so much as the dissolution of the marriage tie. They propose to form a tie for the term of five, six or seven years. Mark the men or women who are the most strenuous advocates of woman suffrage. They are irreligious and immoral.

Who are more strenuous advocates of woman suffrage than Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, Mrs. Lucy Stone, Mrs. Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Livermore, T. W. Higginson, Henry Ward Beecher, Bishop Simpson, Governor Claflin, Gilbert Haven, Wendell Phillips, and scores of others whose lives are as pure and intellects as fine as his who dares stand in the sacred desk and call these persons "irreligious and immoral"? His argument seems to be like this: Some advocates of woman suffrage are in favor of easy divorces. These men and women advocate woman suffrage; therefore these men and women are in favor of easy divorces. Or, to make the matter still plainer, some ministers of the Gospel are immoral. Mr. H. is a minister of the Gospel; therefore Mr. H. is immoral. The method of reasoning is the same, but it don't sound quite fair and honorable, does it?

"In our land woman is a queen; she is loved and cared for," says Mr. Holmes. In sight from the window where I write is a sad commentary upon this. One of these queens, so tenderly cared for, is hoeing corn, while her five-months-old baby—the youngest of nine children—lies on the grass while she works. Her husband is away from home, but has left word for the "old woman" to "take care of the corn and potatoes, for he has to support the family." When they are out of meat, she must go out washing and earn some, for "he has to support the family," and cannot have her idle. Not long since they were planting corn together, she doing as much as he. At noon, although she had a pail of milk and another of eggs, he brought her the two hoes to carry home, as he could not be troubled with them. Had he ever read:

 "I will be master of what is my own; She is my goods, my chattels— My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything"?

"No woman reaches such dignity as the New England wife and mother," says Mr. H. Is wifehood more honorable, or motherhood more sacred, in New England than in other places? Is to be a wife and mother, and nothing else, the sole end and aim of woman? Or is there not other work in God's universe which some woman may possibly be called upon to do? Is Florence Nightingale or Anna Dickinson less dignified than Mrs. John Smith, who happens physically to be the mother of half-a-dozen children, but mentally and morally is as much of a child as any of them?

"Woman has just the sphere she wants. She has more privileges than she could vote herself into," says Mr. H. Has she, indeed? I know women, who would gladly vote themselves into the privilege of having