Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/167

 This pamphlet of over five thousand words which began, “What is the law of woman-life? What was she made woman for, and not man ?”—might be described as the apotheosis of the sentimental effusions of Senators Brown and Vest.

During the discussion Senator George F. Hoar (Mass.) said:

Mr. President, I do not propose to make a speech at this late hour of the day, it would be cruel to the Senate, and I had not expected that this measure would be here this afternoon. I was absent on a public duty and came in just at the close of the speech of my honorable friend from Missouri. I wish, however, to say one word in regard to what seemed to be the burden of his speech.

He says that the women: who ask this change in our political organization are not simply seeking to be put upon school boards and upon boards of health and charity and to [sic]fulfil all the large number of duties of a political nature for which he must confess they are fit, but he says they will want to be President of the United States, and Senators and marshals and sheriffs, and that seems to him supremely ridiculous. Now I do not understand that this is the proposition. What they want is simply to be eligible to such public duty as a majority of their fellow-citizens may think they are fitted for. The most of the public duties in this country do not require robust, physical health, or exposure to what is base or unhealthy; and when those duties are imposed upon anybody it will be only upon such persons as are fit for them.

My honorable friend spoke of the French revolution and the horrors in which the women of Paris took part, and from that he would argue that American wives and mothers and sisters are not fit for the calm and temperate management of our American republican life. His argument would require him by the same logic to agree that republicanism itself is not fit for human society. The argument is against popular government, whether by men or women, and the Senator only applies to this new phase of the claim of equal rights what his predecessors would have argued against the rights which men now enjoy.

But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that woman with her sentiment and emotional nature and liability to be moved by passion and feeling should hold the office of Senator. Why, Mr. President, the Senator’s own speech is a refutation of its own argument. Everybody knows that my honorable friend from Missouri is one of the most brilliant men in this country. He is a logician, he is an orator, he is a man of wide experience, he is a lawyer entrusted with large interests; yet when he was called upon to put forth this great effort of his, this afternoon, and to argue this question which he thinks so clear, what did he do? He furnished the gush and the emotion and the eloquence, but when he wanted an argument he had to call upon two women to supply it. If Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney have to make the argument in the Sen-