Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/83

 of the condition of the South. No one, thank Heaven, regrets the abolition of slavery; but patriotic American citizens, among whom may be numbered some of the most sagacious of the men of colour, hold, it would appear, the opinion that the wiser course would have been to use the power of the reunited Republic at the end of the War of Secession for securing to the negroes every civil right, instead of hurrying on their accession to political rights which have certainly not given them political authority.

I know you will never suppose—hardly, I hope, can even an indignant suffragist imagine — that I am so dull as to suggest, what any man of sense knows to be strictly false, that English women occupy anything like the position of ignorant and scarcely civilized negroes. The suggestion that English women are slaves, patent as is its absurdity, comes, if at all, from the more heated and less wise advocates of woman suffrage. All that is here contended for is that page after page of history exemplifies the futility of giving to any class, whether of men or of women, political rights in excess of genuine political power.