Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/109

Rh Do you think the women of Boston would take the poorest and most unfortunate children in the town, put them altogether into one school, making that the most miserable in the city, where they had not, and could not have half the advantages of the other children in different schools, and all that because the unfortunates were dark coloured? Do you think the women of Boston would shut a bright boy out of the High School or Latin School because he was black in the face?

Women are said to be cowardly. When Thomas Sims, out of his dungeon, sent to the churches his petition for their prayers, had women been “the Christian clergy,” do you believe they would not have dared to pray?

If women had a voice in the affairs of Massachusetts, do you think they would ever have made laws so that a lazy husband could devour all the substance of his active wife, spite of her wish; so that a drunken husband could command her bodily presence in his loathly house; and when an infamous man was divorced from his wife, that he could keep all the children? I confess I do not.

If the affairs of the nation had been under woman's joint control, I doubt that we should have butchered the Indians with such exterminating savagery, that, in fifty years, we should have spent seven hundred million dollars for war, and now, in time of peace, send twenty annual millions more to the same waste. I doubt that we should have spread Slavery into nine new States, and made it national. I think the Fugitive Slave Bill would never have been an Act. Woman has some respect for the natural law of God.

I know men say woman cannot manage the great affairs of a nation. Very well. Government is political economy—national housekeeping. Does any respectable woman keep house so badly as the United States? with so much bribery, so much corruption, so much quarrelling in the domestic councils?

But government is also political morality, it is national ethics. Is there any worthy woman who rules her household as wickedly as the nations are ruled? who hires bullies to fight for her? Is there any woman who treats one-eighth part of her household as if they were cattle and not creatures of God—as if they were things and not