Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/479

 to be said to women. This is quite natural both because of their timidity in putting themselves forward and because of their frequent ignorance of the principles upon which reform is based. No one could be more opposed to woman suffrage than I was twenty years ago. Everything I had read and heard seemed to point in exactly the opposite direction. But at the first meeting I attended I heard Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other pioneers of the cause, found nothing but reasonableness in their speech and their arguments and so was speedily converted.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic was then sung by Prof. James G. Clark, the well-known singer of anti-slavery days, the audience rising and joining in the chorus.

Mrs. Margaret W. Campbell of Iowa, who was introduced by Lucy Stone with a history of her many years of devoted work for the cause, said in part: "Good men who mean well often say that women are as fit to vote as the ignorant foreigners just landed at Castle Garden or the freedmen who can not read or write. Don't say that any more; you don't know how it hurts. Say instead, 'You are as fit to vote as we are.' The names of those who emancipated the slave will be written in letters of gold, but the names of those who have helped to emancipate the women of this nation will be written in letters of living light."

The closing address was made by Mrs. Stone. "Her feeling and womanly appeals," said the Minneapolis papers, "were such as to move any masculine heart not thoroughly indurated." She said in part:

If the question of the right of women to a voice in making the laws they are to obey could be treated in the same common-sense way that other practical questions are treated it would have been settled long ago. If the question were to be asked in any community about to establish a government, "Shall the whole people who are of mature age and. sound mind have a right to help make the laws they are required to obey?" the natural answer would be that they should have that right. But the fact is that only the men exercise it. If the question were asked, "Shall the whole people who are of mature age and sound mind and not convicted of crime have a right to elect the men who will have the spending of the money they pay for taxes?" the common-sense answer would be that they should have that right. But the fact is that only men are allowed to exercise it. So of the special interests of women, their right to settle the laws which regulate their relation to their children, their right to earn and own, to buy and sell, to will and deed, the application of the simple principles of fair play, would have given women equal voice with men in these questions of personal and