Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/744



This Department is for the use of our readers, and expressions limited to six hundred words, are solicited on subjects relating to any social, religious or political question. All manuscript sent in must bear the author's name, though a nom de plume will be printed, if so desired. The publishers will not, of course, be understood as necessarily endorsing any of the views expressed.

The movement for the enfranchisement of women, which has attained such extensive proportions as to command the attention of the entire nation, sprang spontaneously into public notice in the Pacific Northwest, about thirty years ago. Twenty years prior to that time it had arisen in the Eastern states, where though ably managed by many of the most brilliant minds of both sexes- for over half a century, it has never made progress rapidly, as it has done on the Pacific side of the continent.

All great movements for securing the extension of freedom to any class of people have their origin in new countries. If at any time prior to the settlement of our Atlantic border any man had dared to proclaim the fundamental truths upon which this nation is founded, he would have paid the price of his temerity with his head. When first the cry went out from across the seas that "all men are created equal," it startled kings upon their thrones; and the demand of the masses for representation as a just accompaniment of taxation convulsed emperors with laughter. But that cry, born on new soil, flourished in spite of adverse circumstances, and long ere a century of American liberty had been an accepted fact among the older nations of the earth, our new empire had crossed the continent and planted its banners on the western slopes of the Rocky mountains and over beside the Pacific seas.

And yet the enfranchisement of women was not a new thought, even in the formation of the United States government. It is recorded in the archives of the famous Adams family, that on the 2d day of April, 1787, Abigail Adams, wife of one president and mother of another, went before the Continental Congress and made a plea for the recognition of equal rights for her sex. If her husband, John Adams, who as her husband, was the only man who would have dared to take the liberty, and who was secretary of that Congress, had not expunged this patriotic plea of his noble wife from the records, by a conjugal prerogative at that time deemed infallible, and thus prevented further consideration of this great fundamental question, there would now be no need of the pending state constitutional amendment in Oregon, nor would Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho be enjoying the proud distinction that is theirs today of being the onlv states in the American Union in which governments may "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The government, having begun wrong with the negro, and the women, was compelled to struggle along for two- thirds of a century with the negro ques- tion, which still menaces it in many ways; and it is still struggling with the woman question which will never cease to embarrass it until it has been settled in full and due conformity with the Dec- laration of Independence and Constitu- tion of the United States.

It is impossible, in the brief space at my command, to offer arguments in sup- port of my contention; and, further than to cite the opinions of a few eminent men instates where women vote, I shall not attempt it.

A letter from Boise, Idaho, received by the writer for use at the last Woman's Congress in Portland, Oiegon, signed by I. N. Sullivan, chief justice of the supreme court and his associates, J. Waldo Huston and Ralph P. Quarles, says: "None of the evils predicted of equal suffrage by its opponents have come to