Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/485

 one. Don't you know that women will attend to such needs sooner than men?

Mr. Foulke said in part:

It is said that woman suffragists are dreamers. There was a time within our memory when human flesh in this our free America was sold at auction. In those days a few earnest men dreamed of a time when our flag should no longer unfurl itself over a slave. Inspired by this great vision they bore the persecution and contumely of their fellows. In season and out of season they preached their glorious gospel of immediate and unconditional emancipation. Wild visionaries they, incendiaries whose very writings, like the heresies of old, must be consigned to the flames; impracticable enthusiasts, seditious citizens. But lo! the flame of war passed over us and their dream is true; and in the clearer light which. shines upon us to-day, we can hardly realize that this great blot upon our civilization could have existed, the time seems so far away.

And we of America, we who have reached the summit of the prophecies of centuries past, we dream of new and loftier mountains in the distance. We who have realized in our political institutions a universal equality of men before the law, find that we have only reached the foothills of the greater range beyond. There are men in our midst who are dreaming to-day of a time when mere political equality shall be based upon that broader social and economic equality which is so necessary to maintain it. They dream of a time when each man's reward shall be proportioned to his own exertions and his own desert, and nothing at all shall be due to the accident of birth; dream of a time when bitter, grinding poverty, save as a punishment for idleness, shall no longer exist in a world so full of the bounty of heaven. Is it wilder than the dream of him who, under the despotism of the Bourbons, could dream of a great people whose birth should be heralded by the cry that all men are created equal? Is it wilder than the dream of him who, oppressed by the tyranny of Alva, could dream of a day of perfect religious toleration? Men talk with contemptuous pity of the dreamer. But he rather is the object of pity who bars the windows and draws the curtains of his soul to shut out the light of heaven that would smile in upon him. Let us rather pity the man who fears to utter the divine thought which fills him. Let us pity rather that man or that nation which lives in the complacent consciousness of its own virtue and blessedness, and dreams of no higher good than it possesses. He that has a dream of something better than he sees around him, let him tell it though the world smile. He that has a prophecy to utter, let him speak, though men account it his folly as much as they will. God bless the dreamers of all just and perfect dreams! The great wheel of the ages with ever-increasing motion is sure to roll out their accomplishment.

The Rev. Louis A. Banks, lately of Washington Territory, spoke of woman suffrage there. He said: