Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/83

Rh black man, the slave and the freeman, to partake of the suffrage; there is but one thing left out, and that is the mother that taught us, and the wife that is thought worthy to walk side by side with us. It is woman that is put lower than the slave, lower than the ignorant foreigner. She is put among the paupers whom the law won't allow to vote; among the insane whom the law won't allow to vote. But the days are numbered in which this can take place, and she too will vote.

But these words are followed by others somewhat problematical, at least in the respect rendered to women:

But Mr. Evarts approached the close of his oration with these words—and may they not be prophetic—may not the orator have spoken with a deeper meaning than he knew?

Whether the wise (?) legislators see it or not—whether the undercurrent that is beating to the shore speaks with an utterance that is comprehensible to their heavy apprehensions or not, the coming century has in preparation for the country a truer humanity, a better justice of which the protest and declaration of the fathers pouring its vital current down through the departed century, and surging on into the future, is, to the seeing eye, the sure forerunner, the seed-time, of which the approaching harvest will bring a better fruition for women—and they who scoff now will be compelled to rejoice hereafter. But as Mr. Evarts remarked in his allusions to future centennials:

Shall it then be recorded of us that the demand and the protest of the women were not made in vain? Shall it be told to future generations that the cry for justice, the effort to sunder the shackles with which woman has been oppressed from the dim ages of the past, was heeded? Or, shall it be told of us, in the beginning of this second centennial, that justice has been ignored, that only liberty to men entered at this stage of progress, into the American idea of self-government? Freedom to men and women alike is but a question of time—is America now equal to the great occasion? Has her development expanded to that degree where her legislators can say in very truth, as of the colored man, "Let the oppressed go free"?