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 crowned with the rights of citizenship, with the ballot, that scepter of power, in their own right hands.

If there are any who do not wish to vote, that is the strongest reason for their enfranchisement. If all love of liberty has been quenched in their souls by their degraded condition, the duties of citizenship and the responsibility of self-government should be laid upon them at once, for their pitiful indifference is merely the result of their disfranchisement. Would that I could awake in the minds of my countrywomen the full significance of this demand for the right of suffrage; what it is to be queens in their own right, intrusted with the power of self-government, possessed of all the privileges and immunities of American citizens.

Whoever heard of an heir apparent to a throne in the Old World abdicating her rights because some conservative politician or austere bishop doubted woman’s capacity to govern? History affords no such example. Those who have had the right to a throne have invariably taken possession of it and, against intriguing cardinals, ambitious nobles and jealous kinsmen, fought even to the death to maintain the royal prerogatives which by inheritance were theirs. When I hear American women, descendants of Jefferson, Hancock and Adams, say they do not want to vote, I feel that the blood of the revolutionary heroes must long since have ceased to flow in their veins.

Suppose when the day dawned for Victoria to be crowned Queen of England she had gone before the House of Commons and begged that such terrible responsibilities might not be laid upon her, declaring that she had not the moral stamina nor intellectual ability for the position; that her natural delicacy and refinement shrank from the encounter; that she was looking forward to the all-absorbing duties of domestic life, to a husband, children, home, to her influence in the social circle where the Christian graces are best employed. Suppose with a tremulous voice and a few stray tears in her blue eyes, her head drooping on one side, she had said she knew nothing of the science of government; that a crown did not befit a woman’s brow; that she had not the physical strength even to wave her nation’s flag, much less to hold the scepter of power over so vast an empire; that in case of war she could not fight and hence could not reign, as there must be force behind the throne, and this force must be centered in the hand which governed. What would her Parliament have thought? What would other nations have thought?

None of you would admit, honorable gentlemen, that all the great principles of government which center round our theories of justice, liberty and equality in favor of individual sovereignty have not as vet produced as high a type of womanhood as has a monarchy in the Old World. We have a large number of women as well fitted as Victoria for the most responsible positions in the Government, who could fill the highest places with equal dignity and wisdom.

There is no subject more intensely interesting to men than the science of government, and when their wives are intelligent on all