SECRETARY'S REPORT.

Susan B. Anthony said:

It is my duty to present to you at this time a written Report of all that has been done by this Equal Rights Association during the past year; but those of us who have been active in this movement, have been so occupied in doing the work, that no one has found time to chronicle the progress of events. With but half a dozen live men and women, to canvass the State of New York, to besiege the Legislature and the delegates to the Constitutional Convention with tracts and petitions, to write letters and send documents to every State Legislature that has moved on this question, to urge Congress to its highest duty in the reconstruction, 0086by both public and private appeals, has been a work that has taxed every energy and dollar at our command.

Money being the vital power of all movements—the Wood and water of the engine—and, as our work through the past winter has been limited only by the want of it, there is no difficulty in reporting on finance. The receipts of our Association, during the year, have amounted to $4,096 78; the expenditures, for lectures and conventions, for printing and circulating tracts and documents, to $4,714 11—leaving us in debt $617 33.

The Secretary then rapidly rehearsed the signs of progress. She spoke of the discussion in the United States Senate on the Suffrage bill, through three entire days, resulting in a vote in a nine Senators in favor of extending suffrage to the women as well as black men of the District of Columbia; of the section of the Legislatures of Kansas and Wisconsin to strike the words “white male” from their Constitutions; of the discussions and minority votes in the Legislatures of Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Missouri; of the addresses Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone before the Judiciary Committees of the New York and New Jersey Legislatures; of the demand for household suffrage by the women of England, earnestly maintained by John Stuart Mill in the British Parliament—all showing that the public mind everywhere is awake on this question of equal rights to all. Every mail brings urgent request from the West for articles for their papers, for lectures and tracts on the question of suffrage. In Kansas they are planning mass conventions, to be held throughout the State through September and October; and they urge us to send out at least a dozen able men and women, with a hundred thousand tracts, to help them educate the people into the grand idea of universal suffrage, that they may carry the State at the November election.

Two of our agents, Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, are already in Kansas, speaking in all her towns and cities—in churches, school-houses, barns and the open air; travelling night and day, by railroad, stage and ox-cart; scaling he rocky divides and fording the swollen rivers—their hearts all aglow with enthusiasm, greeted everywhere by crowded audiences, brave men and women, ready to work for the same principles for which they have suffered in the past, that Kansas, the young and beautiful hero of the West, may be the first State in the Union to realize a genuine Republic.

The earnest, loyal people of Kansas have resolved to teach the nation to-day the true principle of reconstruction, as they taught the nation, twelve years ago, the one and only way in which to escape from the chains of slavery. They ask us to help them. So do Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and New York. But for this vast work, as I have already shown you, we have an empty treasury. We ask you to replenish it. If you will but give your money generously—if you will but oil the machinery—this Association will gladly do the work that shall 0097establish universal suffrage, equal rights to all, in every State in the Union.

The President (Mrs. Mott ) said:

The report which we have had, although not written, is most interesting. A great deal of it is new to me. My age and feeble health have precluded my engaging actively engaged in the cause, other than in a very limited way. There are so many actively engaged in the cause, that it is fitting that some of us older ones should give place to them. That is the natural order, and every natural order is divine and beautiful. Therefore, I feel glad of the privilege—although my filling the office of President has been a mere nominal thing—to withdraw from the chair, and to yield the place to our friend Robert Purvis, one of our Vice-President. The cause is dear to my heart, and has been from my earliest days. Being a native of the island of Nantucket, where women were thought something of, and had some connection with the business arrangements of life, as well as with their domestic homes, I grew up so thoroughly imbued with woman's rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day. I hail this more public movement for its advocacy, and have been glad that I had strength enough to co-operate to some extent. I have attended most of the regular meetings, and I now feel almost ashamed, old as I am, to be so ignorant of what has happened during the last year. We need a paper—an organ that shall keep those who cannot mingle actively in our public labors better informed. The Standard has done much; and I find in many other papers a disposition to do justice, to a great extent, to our cause. It is not ridiculed as it was in the beginning. We do not have the difficulties, the opposition and the contumely to confront that we had at an early day. I am very glad to find such an audience here today; and far be it from me to occupy the time so as to prevent Mr. May, Mr. Burleigh, and others, from having their proper place.

Mr. Purvis resumed the chair, and introduced Mrs. Stanton, who offered the following resolutions:

Resolved, That government, of all sciences, is the most exalted and comprehensive, including, as it does, all the political, commercial, religious, educational and social interests of the race.

Resolved, That to speak of the ballot a an “article of merchandise,” and of the science of government as the muddy poll of politics,” is most demoralizing to a nation based on universal suffrage.

Mrs. Stanton addressed the meeting as follows:

ADDRESS OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.

In considering the question of suffrage, there are two starting points: one, that this right is a gift of society, in which certain men, having inherited this privilege from some abstract body and abstract place, have now the right to secure it for themselves and their privileged order to the end of time. This principle leads logically to governing races, 0108classes, families; and, in direct antagonism to our idea of self-government, takes us back to monarchies despotisms, to a experiment that has been tried over and over again, 6,000 years, and uniformly failed. “I do not hold my liberties,” says Gratz Brown in the Senate of the United States, “by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe, whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you crystalize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring the death-knell of American liberties.”

Ignoring this point of view as untenable and anti-republican, and taking the opposite, that suffrage is a natural right—as necessary to man under government, for the protection of person and property, as are air and motion to life—we hold talisman by which to show the right of all classes to the ballot, to remove every obstacle, to answer every objection, to point out the tyranny of every qualification to the free exercise of this sacred right.

To discuss the question of suffrage for women and negroes, as women and negroes, and not as citizens of a republic, implies that there are some reasons for demanding this right for these classes that do not apply to “white males.”

The obstinate persistence with which fallacious and absurd objections are pressed against their enfranchisement—as if they were anomalous beings, outside all human laws and necessities—is most humiliating and insulting to every black man and woman who has one particle of healthy, high-toned self-respect. There are no special claims to propose for women and negroes, no new arguments to make in their behalf. The same already made to extend suffrage to all the white men in this country, the same John Bright makes for the working men of England, the same made for the enfranchisement of 22,000,000 Russian serfs, are all we have to make for black me and women. As the greater includes the less, an argument for universal suffrage covers the whole question, the rights of all citizens. In thus relaying the foundations of government, we settle all these side issues of race, color and sex, end all class legislation, and remove forever the fruitful cause of all the jealousies, dissensions and revolution of the past. This is the platform of the American Equal Rights Association. “We are masters of the situation.” Here black men and women are buried in the citizen. As in the war, freedom was the key-note of victory, so now is universal suffrage the key-note of reconstruction.

“Negro suffrage” may answer as a party cry for an effete political organization through another Presidential campaign; but the people of this country have a broader work on hand to-day than to save the Republican party, or, with some abolitionists, to settle the rights of races. The battles of the ages have been fought for races, classes, parties, over and over again, and force always carried the day, and will until we settle the higher, the holier question of individual rights. This is our American 0119idea, and on a wise settlement of this question rests the problem whether our nation shall live or perish.

The principle of inequality in government has been thoroughly tried, and every nation based on that idea that has not already perished, clearly shows the seeds of death in its dissensions and decline. Though it has never been tried, we know an experiment on the basis of equality would be safe; for the laws in the world of morals are as immutable as in the world of matter. As the Astronomer Le Verrier discovered the planet that bears his name by a process of reason and calculation through the variations of other planets from known laws, so can the true statesman, through the telescope of justice, see the genuine republic of the future amid the ruins of the mighty nations that have passed away. The opportunity now given us to make the experiment of self-government should be regarded by every American citizen as a solemn and a sacred trust. When we remember that a nation's life and growth and immortality depend on its legislation, can we exalt too highly the dignity and responsibility of the ballot, the science of political economy, the sphere of government? Statesmanship is, of all sciences, the most exalted and comprehensive, for it includes all others. Among men we find those who study the laws of national life more liberal and enlightened on all subjects than those who confine their researchers in special directions. When we base nations on justice and equality, we lift government out of the mists of speculation into the dignity of a fixed science. Everything short of this is trick, legerdemain, sleight of hand. Magicians may make nations seem to live, but they do not. The Newtons of our day who should try to make apples stand in the air or men walk on the wall, would be no more puerile in their experiments than are they who build nations outside of law, on the basis of inequality.

What thinking man can talk of coming down into the arena of politics? If we need purity, honor, self-sacrifice and devotion anywhere, we need them in those who have in their keeping the life and prosperity of a nation. In the enfranchisement of woman, in lifting her up into this broader sphere, we see for her new honor and dignity, more liberal, exalted and enlightened views of life, its objects, ends and aims, and an entire revolution in the new world of interest and action where she is soon to play her part. And in saying this, I do not claim that woman is better than man, but that the sexes have a civilizing power on each other. The distinguished historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, says:

“The turn of thought of woman, their habits of mind, their conversation, invariably extending over the whole surface of society, and frequently penetrating its intimate structure, have, more than all other things put together, tended to rise us into an ideal world, and lift us from the dust into which we are too prone to grovel.

And this will be her influence in exalting and purifying the world of politics. When woman understands the momentous interests that depend 01210on the ballot, she will make it her first duty to educate every American boy and girl into the idea that to vote is the most sacred act of citizenship—a religious duty not to be discharged thoughtlessly, selfishly or corruptly; but conscientiously, remembering that, in a republican government, to every citizen is entrusted the interests of the nation. “Would you fully estimate the responsibility of the ballot, think of it as the great regulation power of a continent, of all our interests, political, commercial, religious, educational, social and sanitary!”

To many minds, this claim for the ballot suggests nothing more than a rough polling-booth where coarse, drunken men, elbowing each other, wade knee-deep in mud to drop a little piece of paper two inches long into a box—simply this and nothing more. The poet Wordsworth, showing the blank materialism of those who see only with their outward eyes, says of his Peter Bell: “A primrose on the river's brink A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.”

So our political Peter Bells see the rough polling-booth, in this great right of citizenship, and nothing more. In this act, so lightly esteemed by the mere materialist, behold the realization of that great idea struggled for in the ages and proclaimed by the Fathers, the right of self-government. That little piece of paper dropped into a box is the symbol of equality, of citizenship, of wealth, virtue, education, self-protection, dignity, independence and power—the mightiest engine yet placed in the hand of man for the uprooting of ignorance, tyranny, superstition, the overturning of thrones, altars, kings, popes, despotisms, monarchies and empires. What phantom can the sons of the Pilgrims, be chasing, when they make merchandise of a power like this? Judas Iscariot, selling his Master for thirty pieces of silver, is a fit type of those American citizens who sell their votes, and thus betray the right of self-government. Talk not of the “muddy pool of politics,” as if such things must need be. Behold, with the coming of woman into this higher sphere of influence, the dawn of the new day, when politics, so called, are to be lifted into the world of morals and religion; when the polling-booth shall be a beautiful temple, surrounded by fountains and flowers and triumphal arches, through which young men and maidens shall go up in joyful procession to ballot for justice and freedom; and when our elections shall be like the holy feasts of the Jews at Jerusalem. Through the trials of this second revolution shall not our nation rise up, with new virtue and strength, to fulfill her mission in leading all the peoples of the earth to the only solid foundation of government, “equal rights to all?” What an inheritance is ours! What boundless resources for wealth, happiness and development! With every variety of climate and production, with our mighty lakes and rivers majestic forests and inexhaustible mines, nothing can check our 01311future prosperity but a lack of virtue in the people. Let us not, like the foolish prodigal, waste our substance in riotous living, and, through ease, luxury and corruption, check the onward march of this western civilization. Our danger lies, not in the direction of despotism, in the one-man power, in centralization; but in the corruption of the people. Is it not enough to fill any true patriot with apprehension, to read the accounts in our daily journals of the wholesale bribery that unblushingly shows itself everywhere? It is not the poor, unlettered foreigner alone who sells his vote; but native-born American citizens, congressmen, senators, judges, jurors, “white males” who own $250 worth of real estate and can read the Constitution. It is not in Wall street alone that men gamble in stocks; but our State and National Capitols—even our courts of justice—are made houses of merchandise. Women of the Republic, what say you for your son? What say our legislators for themselves?—they who claim to represent their mothers, wives and daughters to have their lives, liberty and happiness in their keeping. “There is something rotten in Denmark.” Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “men are what their mothers made them.” The fountain rises no higher than its source. The art, the stratagem, the duplicity, the sham of our social life is all repeated in our legislation. “Give a man a right over my subsistence,” says Alexander Hamilton, “and he has a right over my whole moral being.” When any class lives by favors, rather than honorable, profitable labor; when shelter, food and clothes are to be wheedled out of a privileged order, life is necessarily based on chicanery, degradation and dishonor. In woman's aimless, dependent education, her noblest aspiration, her holiest sentiments, are perverted or sacrificed. She has but one object in life, and that one is desecrated, compelled as she is, in ease and luxury, to marry for a position, a palace, equipage, silks and diamonds, or, in poverty and isolation, for bread and a home. With marriages of interest, convenience, necessity, the very fountains of life are poisoned. This first false step in our social life can only be remedied by making woman independent, and profitable labor honorable for all. Educate girls for all the avocations of life. Teach them to scorn, as the boy does, to live on the bounty of another. Virtue and independence go hand in hand. If you would have the future men of this nation do justice and walk uprightly, remove every barrier in the way of woman's elevation, that she, too, with honor and dignity on her brow, may stand self-poised, above fear, want or temptation.

Never, until woman is an independent, self-sustaining force in society, can she take her true, exalted position as the mother, the educator of the race. Never, as a dependent on his wish, his will, his bounty to be sheltered, fed and clothed, will man recognize in woman an equal moral power in the universe of mind. The same principle that governed plantation life, governs the home. The master could quote law and gospel for his authority over the slave, so can the husband 01412still. You see man's idea of women true position in his codes and creeds. His commentaries on Blackstone and the Bible alike place her “sub potestate viri;” under the power of man. The mass of both men and women really believe this to be the Heaven-ordained status of a Christian wife. Hence we have, in the home as on the plantation, ruler and subject on one side, purse, power and rights on the other—favors or wrongs, according to the character of the “divinely-appointed head,” But fair, equal-handed justice can never be found where the rights of one class are at the mercy of another. The black man, as a slave, was compelled to lie and cheat and steal. All he got was by his wits; he had no rights which any one was bound to respect. He had nothing to hope for, nothing to gain; hence food and clothes were more to him than principles. But that chain is broken; he is free, holds the ballot, lives on his own earnings. With responsibility come honesty, honor, dignity; and to-day Gov. Orr reasons with him as a man, and gives him dissertations on the policy of fair-dealing with white men. But, if a woman corners her husband in fair debate, shows him that her plan of action in any direction is better than his, he flies into a passion, declares “there is no reasoning with a woman,” and, from sheer will, thwarts the end she desires. Thus she is driven to cunning and management to get what is denied as her right. Shut up to a life of folly, fashion and dependence, with no means of her own to gratify her taste or vanity, she would be a dull scholar not to learn the wisdom of having no opinion, will or wish opposed to him who carries the purse. She has no purse of her own, so she makes bills at the milliner's, the dress-maker's, the fancy store, the restaurant which she cannot pay. She staves off their claims as long as possible; but at last the awful moment comes, and the bills are sent to her husband. He raises a tempest at home, refuses to pay, is sued, and is laughed at in court as some malicious lawyer slowly reads over the articles of his wife's wardrobe and how many times she ate ice-cream or oysters in one week, all of which is published to the world the next day. And this is the beautiful, refined seclusion where the feminine element is supposed to be most favorably developed; from which the liberal pulpit even fears to transplant woman to the world of work, where she may become honest and independent. Under such circumstances, how can woman base her every-day life on principle? False to herself, how can she be true to others? So long as she is petty, servile, tricky, how can her sons be magnanimous, noble and just?

And this is the “home influence” of which we hear so much—the great normal-school of legislators, senators and presidents. Here are your boasted mothers, the women who govern the world, without enough force or dignity or principle to stand upright themselves. The family, that great conservator of national strength and morals—how can you cement its ties but by the virtue and independence of both man and woman? If one-half we hear of the bribery and corruption of our 01513day be true, and we are responsible for this state of things, we must confess that women has made a most lamentable failure in governing the world for the last six thousand years by the “magic power of influence.” If this be indeed her work, and if, in fact, as all philosophers tell us, woman does govern the world, it behooves her now to demand a fitting education for so responsible a position, that she may understand the science of life, and make a new experiment in government with the direct power of the ballot-box; that, by an intelligent use of the franchise, she may so change the conditions of life as to lift the race on a higher platform that she could ever do by tact, cunning or management. The effect of concentrating all woman's thoughts and interests in home-life, intensifies her selfishness and narrows her ideas in every direction; hence she is arbitrary in her views of government, bigoted in religion, and exclusive in society. She is the ignorant, the conservative element, the staunch supporter everywhere of the aristocratic idea. Look at the log line of equipages and liveried servants in Fifth Avenue and Central Park, the pageant composed chiefly of women. Think of stalwart men, dressed up like monkeys, perched on the back seat of a carriage for ornament. A coat of arms and livery belong legitimately to countries that boast an order of nobility, an established church, a law of primogeniture—where families live through centuries; but here, where the follow chandler of yesterday lives in a palace to-day, they are out of place. What a spectacle for us who proclaimed the glorious doctrine of equality a century ago, to be imitating the sham and tinsel of the effete civilizations of the Old World—degrading the dignity and majesty of the idea on which our government is based!

Now men in political life cannot afford to do these things. They always have the ballot-box, that great leveller, before their eyes. They keep their kid gloves in their pockets, shake hands all round, and act as if they believed all men equal, especially about election time. This practice they have in the right direction, does in time mould them a new into broader, more liberal views than the women by their side. When our fashionable, educated women vote, there will be an enthusiasm thrown round our republican idea such as we have never realized before. It is in vain to look for a genuine republic in this country until the women are baptized into the idea, until they understand the genius of our institutions, until they study the science of government, until they hold the ballot in their hands and have a direct voice in our legislation. What is the reason, with the argument in favor of the enfranchisement of women all on one side, without an opponent worthy of consideration—while British statesmen, even, are discussing this question—that Northern men are so dumb and dogged, manifesting a studied indifference to what they can either answer nor prevent? What is the reason that even abolitionists who have fearlessly claimed political, religious and social equality for woman for the last twenty 01614years, should now, with bated breath, give her but a passing word in their public speeches and editorial comments—as if her rights constituted but a side issue in this grave question of reconstruction? All must see that this claim for male -hood suffrage is but another experiment in class legislation, another violation of the republican idea. With the black man we have no new elements in government; but with the education and elevation of woman we have a power that is to galvanize the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life, and thus, by the law of attraction, to lift all races to a more even platform than can ever be reached in the political isolation of the sexes. Why ignore 15,000,000 women in the reconstruction? The philosophy of this silence is plain enough. The black man crowned with the rights of citizenship, there are no political Ishmaelites left but the women. This is the last stronghold of aristocracy in the country. Sydney Smith says: “There always has been, and always will be, a class of men in the world so small that, if women were educated, there would be nothing left below them.”

It is consolation to the “white male,” to the popinjays in all our seminaries of learning, to the ignorant foreigner, the boot-black and barber, the idiot—for a “white male” may vote if he be not more than nine-tenths a fool—to look down on women of wealth and education, who write books, make speeches, and discuss principles with the savans of their age. It is a consolation for these classes to be able to say, well, if women can do these things, “they can't vote, after all.” I heard some boys discoursing thus not long since. I told them they reminded me of a story I heard of two Irishmen the first time they saw a locomotive with a train of cars. As the majestic fire-horse, with all its grace and polish, moved up to a station, stopped, and snorted, as its mighty power was curbed, then slowly gathered up its forces again and moved swiftly on—“be jabers,” says Pat, “there's muscle for you. What are we beside that giant?” They watched it intently till out of sight, seemingly with real envy, as if oppressed with a feeling of weakness and poverty before this unknown power; but rallying at last, one says to the other: “No matter, Pat; let it snort and dash on—it can't vote, after all.”

Poor human nature wants something to look down on. No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims, and why expect the “white male citizen” to enfranchise woman without a struggle—by a scratch of the pen to place themselves on a dead level with their lowest order? And what a fall would that be, any countrymen. In none of the nations of modern Europe is there a class of women so degraded politically as are the women of these Northern States. In the Old World, where the government is the aristocracy, where it is considered a mark of nobility to share its offices and powers—these women of rank have certain hereditary rights which raise them above a majority of the men, certain honors and privileges not granted to serfs or peasants. In England woman may be Queen, hold office, vote on some questions. 01715In the southern States even the women were not degraded below their working population, they were not humiliated in seeing their coachmen, gardeners and waiters go to the polls to legislate on their interests; hence there was a pride and dignity in their bearing not found in the women of the North, and a pluck in the chivalry before which northern doughfaceism has ever cowered. But here, where the ruling class, the aristocracy, is “male”, no matter whether washed or unwashed, lettered or unlettered, rich or poor, black or white, here in this boasted northern civilization, under the shadow of Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall, which Mr. Phillips proposes to cram down the throat of South Carolina—here women of wealth and education, who pay taxes and are amenable to law, who may be hung, even though not permitted to choose the judge, the juror, or the sheriff who does the dismal deed, women who are your peers in art, science and literature—already close upon your heels in the whole world of thought—are thrust outside the pale of political consideration with traitors, idiots, minors, with those guilty of bribery, larceny and infamous crime. What a category is this in which to place your mothers, wives and daughters. “I ask you, men of the Empire State, where on the footstool do you find such a class of citizens politically so degraded? Now, we ask you, in the coming Constitutional Convention, to so amend the Second Article of our State Constitution as to wipe out this record of our disgrace.

“But”, say you, “women themselves do not make the demand.” Mr. Phillips said on this platform, a year ago, that “the singularity of this cause is, that it has to be carried on against the wishes and purposes of its victims,” and he has been echoed by nearly every man who has spoken on this subject during the past year. Suppose the assertion true, is it a peculiarity of this reform?

We established free schools opposed to the will and wishes of the children playing in the sunshine on the highway. We press temperance, opposed to the will and wishes of drunkards and rumsellers. It has always been opposed to the will and wishes of working men that inventors should apply machinery to labor, and thus lift the burdens of life from the shoulders of the race. Ignorant classes have always resisted innovations. Women looked on the sewing-machine as a rival for a long time. Years ago the laboring classes of England asked bread’; but the Cobdens, the Brights, the Gladstones, the Mills have taught them there is a power behind bread, and to-day they ask the ballot. But they were taught its power first, and so must woman be. Again, do not those far-seeing philosophers who comprehend the wisdom, the beneficence, the morality of free trade urge this law of nations against the will and wishes of the victims of tariffs and protective duties? If you can prove to us that women do not wish to vote, that is no argument against our demand. There are many duties in life that ignorant, selfish, unthinking women do not desire to do, and this may be one of them.

01816

“But,” says a distinguished Unitarian clergyman, in a recent sermon on this subject, “they who first assume political responsibilities must necessarily lose something of the feminine element.” In the education and elevation of woman we are yet to learn the true manhood and womanhood, the true masculine and feminine elements. Dio Lewis is rapidly changing our ideas of feminine beauty. In the large waists and strong arms of the girls under his training, some dilettante gentleman may mourn a loss of feminine delicacy. So in the wise, virtuous, self-supporting, common-sense women we propose as the mothers of the future republic, the reverend gentleman may see a lack of what he considers the feminine element. In the development of sufficient moral force to entrench herself on principle, need a woman necessarily lose any grace, dignity or perfection of character? Are not those who have advocated the rights of women in this country for the last twenty years as delicate and refined, as moral, high-toned, educated, just and generous as any women in the land? I have seen women in many countries and classes, in public and private; but have found none more pure and noble than those I meet on this platform. I have seen our venerable President in converse with the highest of English mobility, and even the Duchess of Sutherland did not eclipse her in grace, dignity and conversational power. Where are there any women, as wives and mothers, more beautiful in their home life than Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone, or Antoinette Brown Blackwell? Let the freedman of the South Sea Islands testify to the faithfulness, the devotion, the patience and tender mercy of Frances D. Gage, who watched over their interests, teaching them to read and work for two long years. Some on our platform have struggled with hardship and poverty—been slaves even in “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and bear the scars of life's battle. But is a self-made woman less honorable than a self-made man? Answer our arguments. When the Republic is in danger, no matter for our manners. When our soldiers came back from the war, wan, weary, and worn, maimed, halt, blind, wrinkled and decrepit—their banners torn, their garments stained with blood—who, with a soul to feel, thought of anything but the glorious work they had done? What if their mothers on this platform be angular, old, wrinkled and gray? They, too, have fought a good fight for freedom, and proudly bear the scars of the battle. We alone have struck the key-note of reconstruction. While man talks of “equal, impartial, manhood suffrage,” we give the certain sound, “universal suffrage.” While he talks of the rights of races, we exalt the higher, the holier idea proclaimed by the Fathers, and now twice baptized in blood, “individual rights.” To woman it is given to save the Republic. You have seen, no doubt, an engraving of that beautiful conception of the artist, Beatrice and Dante. On a slight elevation stands the ideal woman, her whole attitude expressive of conscious power and dignity. Erect, self-poised, she gazes into the heavens as if to draw inspiration and life from the great soul of truth. 01917The man, on a lower plane, looks up with admiration and reverence, with a chaste and holy love; and thus the poet tells us, by the law of attraction woman leads man upward and onward, even through the hells, to heaven. I have sometimes thought, in gazing on this picture, that it was suggestive of what might be our future position. But, for this stage of civilization, I would draw a line half way between our poets and law-makers—between Dante and Blackstone—and place woman neither at man's feet nor above his head, but on an even platform by his side.

Susan B. Anthony, in behalf of the Executive Committee, reported the following resolutions for consideration:

Resolved, That as republican institutions are based on individual rights, and not on the rights of races or sexes, the first question for the American people to settle in the reconstruction of the government, is the RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS.

Resolved, That the present claim for “manhood suffrage,” masked with the words “equal,” “impartial,” “universal,” is a cruel abandonment of the slave women of the South, a fraud on the tax-paying women of the North, and an insult to the civilization of the nineteenth century.

Resolved, That the proposal to reconstruct our government on the basis of manhood suffrage, which emanated from the Republican party and has received the recent sanction of the American Anti-Slavery Society, is but a continuation of the old system of class and caste legislation, always cruel and proscriptive in itself, and ending in all ages in national degradation and revolution.

On motion of Miss Anthony, a Finance Committee was appointed, consisting of Harriet Purvis, Mary F. Gilbert, Charles Lenox Remond, and Anna Rice Powell.

On motion of Charles C. Burleigh, a business Committee was appointed, consisting of Ernestine L. Rose, Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances D. Gage, and Samuel J. May.

ADDRESS OF REV. SAMUEL J. MAY.

Rev. Mr. May said:

I wish to give my testimony most earnestly and solemnly to the conviction, which has continually increased in my soul since my attention was first called to the subject, that this is a fundamental question. How can we expect that our government will be well conducted when one half, and that too what we have been accustomed to call the “better half,” of its constituency is disfranchised, and unable to influence it as it should? It is now twenty-two years since I delivered my first public discourse on this subject; and when I have insisted, as I have done during that time, that women should be allowed to take part in the government, it has always been thrown in my teeth that women were governing the nation after all through their influence over their husbands, 02018brothers, and sons. I was delighted with the remarks of Mrs. Stanton on this subject. In the first place, women cannot influence their husbands, nor educate their sons, as they should do, because they are not properly informed, and have no inducement to become informed. Were they to feel a responsibility, doubtless the better part of them would prepare themselves to discharge their duty; but knowing that they have nothing to do with the government of the country, you can hardly persuade our young women to study the subject. Years ago I insisted that the Constitution of the United States should be introduced into the common schools of the city where I live, to be studied by girls as well as boys. Yet I hardly know half a dozen girls there who have taken the least interested in it. Why? Because, when any allusion is made to women's participation in the government, it has been met with a sneer, which so many dread more than they do a bullet; and this has doubtless deterred them from it.

I was glad, too, to hear the reply so successfully made to the objection that women do not demand this right. That is no reason why they should not be required to exercise it. It is their right because it is their duty. It is their duty because it is their right. We have the most glorious inheritance that God ever gave to a nation, the privilege of governing ourselves. Where does self-government begin? Where does it reside? In the individual. No individual that cannot govern himself can contribute in the least toward the government of the country in which he lives. He becomes a burden, if not a curse. Knowing that women have the same moral powers as men, the same intellectual powers, the same affections, that they are governed by the same laws, and amenable to the same government, who can doubt that if they were made sensible of their responsibilities in the government of the country, and that they cannot contribute in the least to the well-being of the community unless they can contribute those virtues and graces which constitute the true government of one's self; this would have the most inspiring and elevating influence upon them? Think you they would continue to be the servants of mere fashion, as too many of them now are?

By our refusal to act in accordance with the eternal principles of righteousness set forth in the Declaration of Independence and in the preamble of the Constitution of the country, we have been brought into a terrible civil war, which has resulted in a disorganized condition requiring reconstruction. Why should we not see to it that our country as a whole, and that each individual State of the country, shall be reconstructed on this true basis, so that, if possible, nothing may be left to be done hereafter to improve the foundations on which this nation rests?

Many say, “One thing at a time. You have been struggling for the abolition of slavery and obtained that; and now claim the political rights of the colored men, and will undoubtedly get them. Why can't you be satisfied?” Because that would leave a tremendous wrong at the foundation 02119of our country. What will be the consequence, God only knows, should we dare to go on with such a fatal mistake in the basis of our institutions. It is presumption to suppose that we can do this without incurring, sooner or later, awful consequences. We cannot predict what they will be; but that they will be great and awful our past experiences should teach us. It was thought a very little matter to leave our Constitution indefinite as to the rights of colored men. Our fathers in the meetings held to ratify the Constitution, said they had done all that could be expected, said that the death-blow was struck at the institution of slavery, that it would soon die out a natural death; and thus they quieted those who were distrustful because slavery was not explicitly abolished in the Constitution. The people, engaged in their various pursuits, ambitious for office, eager for wealth, let this seed of wrong become a mighty upas tree that covered our republic all over and scattered everywhere its poisonous fruits. Shall we dare to go on for another period of our national existence knowing that at the foundation of our government there is a tremendous wrong?

What should the government of a nation be? Ought it not to be as much as possible like the government of a well-ordered family? Can you think of any model so good as the divine model set before us in the family? What would the family be with a father and without a mother? To whom do you owe the the most—your father or your mother? Who controlled the family most effectually? Some thirty years ago, being chairman of the Board of Education in my district, I proposed to put a woman into a school where the male teachers had been set at nought year after year. It stood the lowest in rank when she took it; but in less than a month its character was obviously changed, and at the end of the term it stood number three in point of character as well as in scholarship. Men are not governed by the fear of punishment. They are governed by a strong, persistent manifestation of the consciousness of a right to govern them; and that is pressed upon them more effectually by the influence of a mother or a sister than of a father or a brother. Just so it will be in the government of our country, when women shall educate and prepare themselves to take part in that government, with their almost instinctive perception of the right, the true, and the good.

And if our fathers and mothers were what they might and should be, the children would be so well trained that they would govern themselves, and there would be very little need of the instrumentality of a political organization. If women understood that it was not only their right but their duty to educate themselves to be citizens of the State, we should have, instead of the trifling topics which now occupy their attention in our domestic circles, the consideration of great questions; and doubtless their finer perceptions often would help to settle great questions aright; and they who should go forth from that family circle tion the various relations of life, would go prepared to advocate the 02220right, to illustrate the truth, and at the ballot-box to give their votes for the true and the right.

It is my first conviction respecting the future well-being of our country, that it is to be measured exactly by our treatment of the colored man. My second conviction is that the well-being of our country never will be effectually provided for until the better half of humanity is educated and instructed, and required to take part in the enactment of the laws and in their administration.

Mrs. Mott then introduced the venerable Sojourner Truth, who was greeted with loud cheers, after which she said:

My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don't know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food. I want you to consider on that, chil'n. I call you chil'n; you are somebody's chil'n, and I am old enough to be mother of all that is here. I want women to have their rights. In the Courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women it is unfit for men to be there. I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do; I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. I have done a great deal of work; as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay; so with the German women. They work in the field and do as much work, but do not get the pay. We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much. I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored woman. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked. 02321What we want is a little money. You men know that you get as much again as women when you write, or for what you do. When we get our rights we shall not have to come to you for money, for then we shall have money enough in our own pockets; and may be you will ask us for money. But help us now until we get it. It is a good consolation to know that when we have got this battle once fought we shall not be coming to you any more. You have been having our right so long, that you think, like a slaveholder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again. I have been in Washington about three years, seeing about these colored people. Now colored men have the right to vote; and what I want is to have colored women have the right to vote. There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom. I am going to talk several times while I am here; so now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here.

Accordingly, suiting the action to the word, Sojourner sang, “We are going home.” There, children, said she, after singing, we shall rest from all our labors; first do all we have to do here. There I am determined to go, not to stop short of that beautiful place, and I do not mean to stop till I get there, and meet you there too.

Charles C. Burleigh moved to amend the third resolution by striking out the word “mere,” which was adopted.

ADDRESS OF C. C. BURLEIGH.

Mr. Burleigh said:

I consider it among the good omens with which the Society enters upon its new year of labor, that its workers have been so busy during the year, as appears from the informal report of the Secretary this morning, that really they have not had time to let the left hand know what the right hand was doing. It shows an earnestness, a determination, a vigor, an industry, which cannot co-exist with a cause of righteousness like the one before us without hopeful results. There is no narrow question here. We are not contending for Woman's Rights or for Negro Suffrage, alone; but we are contending for a broad principle of right applicable to the whole race. Those who stand in opposition to as have really nothing to stand upon. While we may fairly assume that the burden of proof lies upon those who urge objections, that ours is the affirmative case, and all that we are bound to do is to answer objections; yet in this reform, as in others which have preceded it, its enemies not being willing to take the burden of proof, we have undertaken to do their work as well as our own. We are willing therefore, for the sake of meeting every cavil, for the sake of fighting every shadow of objection, to take the laboring oar which the other side should take, and to prove the objections unfounded which they have not yet attempted to prove well-founded.

02422

We are told sometimes that women ought to share with men in the rights we claim for humanity, because of the difference of sex; that there is a sex of soul as well as of body. This is an objection practically cutting its own throat; because if it is true that there is a diversity of sex in soul which ought to be recognised in the political institutions as well as in social arrangements, how can you rightly determine woman's proper place in society by the standard of a man's intellect? How can man's intellect determine what kind of legislation suits the condition of woman? The very fact, then, of the diversity of the masculine understanding and masculine spirit, proves the necessity of assigning to woman a share in the work which is to be done affecting woman. Manifestly one of these two things must be true: Either there is no such essential difference as to be worthy to be taken into account, in which case woman has the same rights as man, and there is no necessity for making a distinction; or there is an essential difference, in which case man is not competent to do the work of legislating for the whole of society without the aid of woman. We might just as well let one effigy stand in the tailor's shop, as the standard of measurement of every garment the tailor is to make, and also of every garment the dressmaker is to make, as to found the legislation for all upon one standard. If you recognise difference, let your legislation proceed from both elements of the body politic which your legislation is to affect.

It is said also, that if you allow women to vote, the logic of your argument will go further and require that women shall be voted for, and they may chance to receive votes enough for election; and they may even go to the State Legislature or to Congress. Suppose such a thing should happen, would a city which is represented in the Congress of the United States by John Morrissey and Fernando Wood, have reason to blush if by some singular good fortune she should chance to be represented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton? (Applause.) Would the Halls of Congress suffer any loss of dignity, or any loss of efficiency, even if John Morrissey's place should the vacated to make room for Mrs. Stanton, or if some Pennsylvania Democrat should be allowed to remain at home while Lucretia Mott occupied his chair? (Applause.) Is it so terrible that women who can utter sentiments as noble and elevating as those to which you have listened, who can sustain them by logic as clear, and who can expose with such delicate wit the ridiculous absurdity of the opposite side, should have a voice in the counsels of the nation?

Somebody says that “the child is father to the man.” You know who govern the children. Who governed you when you were children? Is it not as safe that woman should govern in the halls of national legislation as in the family and in the school? You will find in hundreds of schools, governed a few years ago by men, only women for teachers to-day. I remember that in a building which contained some three hundred pupils, the last man employed as a teacher, was an assistant teacher under the supervision of a woman as principal; a woman who has vindicated 02523her right to the place by her admirable administration, and her admirable adaption to the business of teaching, so that she has become, as it were, a fixture in that schoolhouse. And that is only one case among many. And if woman excels in government in those spheres in which she has had an opportunity to prove her ability, it is at least safe to try the experiment further.

We have just seen one folly, absurdity refuted by the simple process of trying an experiment. The time was when it was deemed altogether unwomanly, and repugnant to female delicacy, and refinement, for a woman to ink the ends of her fingers in handling a pen; for a woman to be what was derisively called a “blue-stocking,” or a literary woman. It was thought that nothing but pedantry, nothing but slatternly habits and neglected housekeeping, could come of it. But who would be willing to banish from the literary world to-day such names as Browning, Hemans, Stowe, and Gage? And if I were to fill out the catalogue of names, I might close my speech at the end of it, having tired you all with the length of the recital.

So it was said that women should not appear on the public platform. But who now would banish the women who have delighted such vast congregations, and who have drawn such applause from all classes and conditions of men. Who, to-day, considers it improper for Lucy Stone, Anna Dickinson, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, to appear upon a public platform? Who is willing to shut the pulpit against Mrs. Mott, when she has filled it with such acceptance, in so many places, and on so many occasions?

Step by step, woman has advanced towards her right position. Step by step, as she advanced, she has proved her right, to the satisfaction of cavilling scepticism itself. I remember an anecdote which illustrates this point, related by the man who was himself the principal in the story. An orthodox clergyman, educated to believe that the woman who attempts to speak in public flies right in the face of St. Paul, common decency and everything else which should be respected, heard that Lucy Stone was to speak in the city where he dwelt; and though it was rather against his feelings, still he satisfied himself that it was right that he should go to take the dimensions of this new danger that was to be encountered. As he rose from his seat, after the evening's discourse, he said to himself, “No matter what I think of this matter; God made you for an orator, little woman.”

She would now go a step further. She demands the rights, not of womanhood, but of humanity. And I feel just as confident that what she demands will be conceded, in reference to her political rights, as that it has been conceded with regard to these other rights, which are now settled in the estimation of thinking and reasoning people. The tide sets that way, clearly and strongly. Kansas is not to go alone, in granting this right to woman. The agitation is to go on; and the more you resist the current of events, the more earnestly will the agitation be 02624continued until reason shall be convinced; until prejudice shall be overcome by the power of conviction; until men are constrained, from very shame, to withdraw from a position which no argument, no experience can justify, which no consideration of decency will palliate.

It is said sometimes that politics is such a vile, dirty business that we do not like to see the fair fingers of woman soiled by dabbling therein. That is a precious recommendation that you bestow upon politics while under the sole management of masculine humanity! But supposing it to be deserved; did you ever know woman to go into any dirty place that she did not leave cleaner than she found it? Let her go into the veriest abode of wretchedness, destitution and suffering, and you will find that she brings there at least one gleam of light amid the darkness. Introduce woman into the lowliest abode of penury, and she will find somewhere the means of improving its aspect; so that if it cannot be positively beautiful, it shall be less deformed and ugly. I do not believe that politics are so incurably vile, so inevitably corrupt and polluted, that there cannot be some measure of purification introduced there by the influence of woman. But we are asked, would you expose woman to the turbulence of the polls? Would you have her face those disagreeable concomitants of an election, the whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking, pipe-smoking, tobacco-chewing, profane and vulgar men that crowd around the voting place? I do not think this is altogether a just description of the scenes which an election places before us. But if it is, you have still two expedients. One is for men to learn better manners, and make it a less discreditable place to go to; or let them practice the best they know; for the very fact that they raise this objection shows that they know better than they have been willing to practice. But if coarseness, vulgarity, and brutality are hopelessly connected with the polls, then let there be separate places provided for women, as at the post-offices in the larger cities. But if you do not adopt this plan, I beseech you not to write over one of them, “For ladies,” and over the other, “For gentlemen, “ unless the gentleman is to be understood as a lucus a non lucendo, a gentleman from the absence of all the qualities of gentlemanly character.

Another objection to our claim is, that the right of voting should not belong to human beings as individuals, but rather to households of human beings. This is not a denial of equality in all respects, but an allegation that the right belongs neither to the man nor to the woman, but to the household; and that for the household, as its representative, the man casts the ballot. Suppose I concede that, what then? Why should the head of the household, or rather the hand of the household be masculine rather than feminine? We have heard the argument over and over again that women should leave to man the counting-house, the work-bench, and all the duties supposed peculiarly to appertain to masculine humanity, and should attend to “household” matters. If, then, suffrage is a household matter, why should not woman attend to 02725it, in her feminine capacity, as peculiarly within her domestic province, and relieve man from the interruption of his appropriate duties?

Rev. Mr. May —Will my friend allow me to suggest that one objection which I have not heard commented upon, is that if you give woman the ballot, the refined and delicate will not exercise it, but only the vulgar and the gross, who will do no better at the polls than similar men.

Mr. Burleigh —I think it is quite possible, from the education the people have had so long, that in the first instance those who go to the polls will be the two extremes, the best women and the worst, and that the great body of the intermediate class will stay away, partly because not thoroughly and clearly convinced of their right and duty, and still more because they have not yet summoned up courage enough to face the terrible sneer which our friend has told us is more fearful than the ballot. Possibly we should see at the polls, at first, those who are with us on the platform of this Association, on the one hand, and on the other extreme, the vilest who can be brought up to serve the purposes of any demagogue unscrupulous enough to use them. I do not by any means admit that this is certain. I have my doubts about it. But suppose it to be so; what will be the consequence? If the better element were not sufficient to neutralize the worst at once, in which case no evil would result, the middle class of women would have the duty pressed right home upon them to give their influence and their votes to counteract the evil tendency of the action of the more degraded and ignorant of their own sex; just a we see in great emergencies, inn critical periods in political affairs, multitudes of men are drawn to the polls from the exigency of the time, who ordinarily do not go. Many a man went to the polls in the elections that took place during the progress of the war, when the question was whether the nation's life should be given up or should be manfully defended, who had not been accustomed to go. So it will be here. Let the sensible, intelligent, virtuous women of the country, understand that by a change in the Constitution of the State the responsibility is laid upon them to see to it that the Republic receives no detriment, and that this power shall not be abused by the worst portion of their sex, and, trust me, there is virtue enough, patriotism, love, humanity, self-devoted, self-sacrificing conscientiousness enough, in that sex, to carry them as eagerly to the polls, as the same qualities carried them to the hospital, and even to the battle-field, where, in the very shock of contending arms, they were attending to the wounded, caring for the suffering and performing a ministration which extorted admiration even from the despisers of unsexed womanhood. (Applause.)

Rev. Mr. Ray inquired what was the basis for the right of suffrage, if suffrage was not, as Mr. Burleigh had said yesterday in another place, a natural right. If it does not belong to the individual whence does it come? The Sultan of Turkey may claim that the right belongs to him, 02826and that he may delegate that right to whomsoever he will assist him in the government of the people. But in a Republic the right must be in the individual; and if so, it belongs to woman as well as to man, to black as well as to white persons. If the right of suffrage is not a natural right, why has not the Constitutional Convention about to meet the right to limit the suffrage if they think it will secure the best interests of the State?

ADDRESS OF FRANCES D. GAGE.

Mrs. Frances D. Gage, said:

I have but little to say because it is almost 2 o'clock, and hungry and weary people are not good listeners to speeches. I shall confine my remarks therefore to one special point brought up this morning and not fully discussed. Sojourner Truth gave us the whole truth in about fifteen words: “If I am responsible for the deeds done in my body, the same as the white male citizen is, I have a right to all the rights he has to help him through the world.” I shall speak for the slave woman at the South. I have always lifted my voice for her when I have spoken at all. I will not give up the slave woman into the hands of man, to do with her as he pleases hereafter. I know the plea that was made to me in South Carolina, and down in the Mississippi valley. They said, “You give us a nominal freedom, but you leave us under the heel of our husbands, who are tyrants almost equal to our masters.” The former slave man of the South has learned his lesson of oppression and wrong of his old master; and they think the wife has no right to her earnings. I was often asked, “Why don't the Government pay my wife's earnings to me?” When acting for the Freedman's Aid Society, the orders came to us to compel marriage, or to separate families. I issued the order as I was bound to do, as General Superintendent of the Fourth Division under General Saxton. The men came to me and wanted to be married, because they said if they were married in the church, they could manage the women, and take care of their money, but if they were not married in the church the women took their own wages and did just as they had a mind to. But the women came to me and said, “We don't want to be married in the church, because if we are our our husbands will whip the children and whip us if they want to; they are no better than old masters.” The biggest quarrel I had with the colored people down there, was with a plantation man because I would not furnish a nurse for his child. “No, Nero,” said I, “I cannot hire a nurse for your child while Nancy works in the cotton field.” “But what is we to do? I'se a poor miserable man and can't work half the time, and Nancy is a good strong hand; and we must have a nurse.” He went away in utter disgust, and declared to the people outside that I had got the miserablest notion he had ever heard, to spoil a good field hand like his Nancy to nurse her own baby.

We were told the other day by Wendell Phillips, upon the Anti-Slavery 02927platform, that it takes people forty years to outgrow an old idea. And he proved to us, if his silver words are good for anything, that it took five years to outgrow old ideas. The slave population of the South is not yet removed a hundred years from the barbarism of Africa, where women have no rights, no privileges, but are trampled under foot in all the savageism of the past. And the slave man has looked on to see his master will everything as he willed, and he has learned the lesson from his master. Mr. Higginson told us that the slave-master never understood the slave. I know that to be the fact. Neither do men understand woman to-day, because she has always been held subservient to him. Now it is proposed to give manhood the suffrage, in all these Southern States, and to leave the poor slave woman bound under the ban of the direct curse of slavery to him who is the father of her children.

It is decreed upon all the statute books of slavery, that the child shall follow the condition of the mother. That has been the decree from the beginning of this awful slave system; that the whitest woman, the child of a slave mother, whose hair curled down to her waist, and whose blue eyes of beauty were a lure to the Statesman of the South, should be a slave, though the Governor of the State were her father. Are you to leave her there yet, and desecrate marriage, by making it such a bond of slavery that the woman shall say, “I do not want to be married to suffer oppression!” Are you to force prostitution and wrong upon those people by these unjust laws?” Are you to compel wickedness and crime? Are you going to let it stand upon the statute books of the southern States that the only woman free to work for her own child shall be the mother of illegitimate children? That is the consequence of what you are doing to the people who in all time past, since they have lived upon this continent, have been denied the right of sacred marriage; and who must have, as Wendell Phillips tell us, forty years to outgrow the past, or to educate them.

We are told by Mr. Phillips to flood the South with spelling-books. Who is to carry them there? Who, to-day, is teaching the southern people;—for I am talking now in behalf of the colored woman of the South, forgetting my own degradation. Who have carried the spelling-book to the South? The women of the North, gathering up their strength, have been sent down by all these great Societies to teach. The colored men of the South are to vote, while they deny the ballot to their teacher! It is said that women do not want to vote in this country. I tell you, it is a libel upon womanhood. I care not who says it. I am in earnest. They do want to vote. Fifty-two thousand pulpits in this country have been teaching women the lesson that has been taught them for centuries, that they must not think about voting. But when fifty-two thousand pulpits, or fifty-two thousand politicians, at the beginning of this war, lifted up their voices and asked of women, “Come out and help us,” did they stand back? In every hamlet, in 03028every village, in every cabin and every palace, in every home in the whole United States, they rose up and went to work. They worked for the government; they worked for the nation; they worked for their sons, their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their friends. They worked night and day. Who found women to stand back when this great public opinion that bad been crushing them so long and forbidding them to work, at last lifted itself up and said, “You may work?” (Applause.)

I have been travelling all winter long, with a few intervals of rest, talking not upon Equal Rights, but upon the subject of Temperance; and whenever I said to my crowded audiences that we must give to woman the right to vote that she may purify the nation of this great sin, there went up shouts and clapping of hands of men and women. They are ready for this work. What we want is to crystallize the public opinion of all ranks of society in its favor. There is great fear that if woman is allowed to vote, she will lose something of her high and excellent character. If it is right for woman to have the suffrage, it is not right to talk of expediency. If giving woman the ballot will cause her to lose her prestige, it is because she ought to lose it. If she gains physical strength, and loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for nothing and cares for nothing but its own selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with joy unspeakable. My strong hands have titled the fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed the horse, and brought the wood to the door; have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be shod. These are things I do not often tell in public. I have braved public opinion; I have tilled my garden; I have brought myself up from fainting weakness occasioned by accident and broken bones. I have taken care of myself, supported myself, and asked nothing from the world; I find my womanhood not one bit degraded. (Applause.)

A thousand times in the last years, in this struggle for bread, have I been asked, “Why don't you let you sons support you?” My answer is, “My six sons have their own duties. My six boys have their own labors. God gives me strength to earn my own bread, and I will do it as long as I can.” (Applause.) That is what I want to teach the womanhood of the country. I did not mean to talk so long, but I assure you I talk in earnest. If I sometimes, by a slip of the tongue, make some little mistake—for I have not been educated in the schools, (a log cabin schoolhouse in the wilderness gave me all I have)—you will excuse me, for I mean no injustice to any one. And if to-night it will not crowd some better woman or man from the platform, I shall be glad to speak to you again.

Mrs. Mott. —The argument that has been made that women do not want to vote is like that which we had to meet in the early days of the Anti-Slavery enterprise that the slaves did not want to be free. I remember that in one of our earliest Woman's Rights Conventions, in 03129Syracuse, the reply was made to this argument, that woman was not much to be blamed, because the power of the government and of the church, that was vested in man by the laws, made it impossible for woman to rise, just as it was impossible for the slave to rise while the chains were around him, and while the slaveholder's foot was upon his neck. The common and civil law of England made woman a cypher, and blotted out her civil existence upon her marriage. Blackstone, in his commentaries, says that the law made the husband and wife one person, and that person the husband. This being the power of the husband over the wife, as established by law, that despotism followed which must ever be exercised, when power is vested in one over another, be it man or woman, to the great injury of the victim. The law had crushed woman; and the Church, supporting the law, had assumed that the bible forbade women from using her rights. And if she asked to be a religious teacher, the perversion of the words of Paul was presented to keep her back. When she became a wife, the Church stepped in, and asserted the authority of the husband, and made the wife acknowledge her inferiority and promise obedience to him. That extends down to the present time. That is the law of marriage now among the great body of religious professors in the land; and it is well for woman to know it. Until she can be brought to a sense of her natural and inalienable rights, to go forth and defend herself against these chains of society, she will be kept in this low state.

The resolution which was offered in Syracuse, as nearly as I remember it, was that as the assertion that the slave did not want his freedom, and would not take it if offered to him, only proved the depth of his degradation, so the assertion that woman had all the rights she wanted only gave evidence how far the influences of the law and customs, and the perverted application of the Scriptures, had encircled and crushed her. This was fifteen or twenty years ago. Times are altered since. In the Temperance reformation, and in the great reformatory movements of our age, woman's powers have been called into action. They are beginning to see that another state of things is possible for them, and they are beginning to demand their rights. Why should this church be granted for such a meeting as this, but for the progress of the cause? Why are so many women present, ready to respond to the most ultra and most radical sentiments here, but that woman has grown, and is able to assume her rights?

In regard to the remark of Mrs. Gage that by the want of the consecration of marriages by the Church, the sacred and holy ordinance of marriage is prostituted I wish to say that it does not follow that marriages unattended by religious ceremonies are therefore not true marriages. It is now two hundred years since George Fox took the ground, far in advance of the age in which he lived, that the parties themselves were sufficient for the marriage union; that marriage did not necessarily require either to be sanctified by the minister or legalized by the 03230magistrate; but that the parties themselves, acknowledging the religious obligation of so sacred a union, were sufficient. And in that Society, the parties were at liberty to appoint their own time and place, and to invite such of their friends and neighbors as they wished to be present; then, in acknowledgment of the divine presence, their obligations to each other were announced, entirely reciprocal, with no assumption of authority on the one hand or promise of obedience on the other; but entire reciprocity, and a pledge of fidelity and affection until death should separate them. For two hundred years, the marriages in the Society of Friends thus conducted, have been held as sacred, the union has been as harmonious, and the management of the children as free from complaint, as any other marriages in the community. The Parliament of England, after a time, saw fit to legalize such marriages; and so in our own country do the laws of the several States.

In many of the States the laws have been so modified that the wife now stands in a very different position as regards the right of property and other rights, from that which she occupied fifteen or twenty years ago. You see the same advance in the literary world. I remember when Maria Edgeworth and her sister first published their works, that they were afraid to publish their own name, and borrowed the name of their father. So Frances Power Cobbe was not able to write under her own name, and she issued her “Intuitive Morals” without a name; and her father was so much pleased with the work, without knowing it was his daughter's, that it led to an acknowledgement after a while.

The objection has been made to me—“Here you assume equality and independence. Now, I feel dependent on my husband for everything.” Women in our Society do not feel dependent for anything. There are independent themselves; and in the true relation of marriage the husband and wife will be equal. Let woman be properly educated; let her physically, intellectually and morally be properly developed; and then, in the marriage relation, in spite of law and custom and religious errors, the independence of the husband and wife will be equal.

I was delighted with the remarks made in our Anti-Slavery meeting by our friend Durant, that the conscience, and the sense of right in man, was the basis of law. The idea seemed rather new; but it occurred to me that our friend Burleigh told us that, twenty years ago. We were told, too, that when the work of the Anti-Slavery Society should be finished, there would still be work to do. And although Wendell Phillips is sensitive with regard to the introduction of this question upon the Anti-Slavery platform, adhering so strictly to the Constitution of that Society that he does not want anything attached to it of the other great reforms of the day which do not legitimately belong to it, I think we shall find that he will continue to be as able an advocate for woman as he has been, and that he really does not lower our standard in any respect.

03331

Stephen S. Foster. —Will you give us the evidence that the statement that the women of this country do not want the ballot is not true? I should be glad to believe that; but in may experience the worst opposition to the progress of Woman's Right has come from woman herself. The greatest indifference to the cause is to found among women, and not among men. I wish it were not so. I hope I am mistaken. But I believe nine out of every ten of our public speakers will tell you that they find more help, more sympathy from men than from women.

Rev. S. J May. —I should like to have that question settled, so far as the women present are concerned. Will as many of you as will vote when the right is awarded to you, please to manifest it by rising.

Nearly the whole of the ladies present immediately arose. Indeed, the reporter, from the platform, could not see a single lady who retained to seat.

Mrs. Gage. —During the last fifteen years, with the utmost industry I could use in ascertaining the public opinion in this country, I have never found one solitary instance of a woman, whom I could meet alone by her fireside, where there was no fear of public opinion, or the minister, or the law-maker, or her father, or her husband, who did not tell me she would like to vote. (Applause.) I never found a slave in my life, who, removed from the presence of the people about him, would not tell me he wanted liberty—never one. I have been in the slave States for years. I have been in the slave-pens, and upon the plantations, and have stood beside the slave as he worked in the sugar cane and the cotton-field; and I never found one who dared in the presence of white men to say he wanted freedom. When women and young girls are asked if they want to vote, they are almost always in just that situation where they are afraid to speak what they think; and no wonder they so often say they do not want to vote.

On motion, the meeting adjourned until 7½ o'clock this evening.

ADDRESS OF COL. MOSS.

I presume no one is less prepared to make a speech to-night than I but I must confess that this is a subject upon which I have though for a considerable number of years; and I have become fully convinced that no reason can be assigned for extending the right of suffrage to any of the male sex, that does not equally apply to the female. I believe if we are ever to establish a Republic in safety, it must be based upon the consent of the governed; and it must be the governed of the “better half” as well as of the worse half of humanity. I know that this is received with a good deal of prejudice, and that we have a great 03432many objections made to such a proposition. To one of those objections, and only one, I will refer; and it seems to me that persons would be careful not to urge that objection if they reflected upon the consequences which necessarily flow from it.

I believe you will not refuse to concur with me in saying that those who assert that the discharge of our duties as citizens is too disreputable for females to be present and to participate in, are not very good friends to republican government. For if it is disreputable and calculated to injure the moral character of the female sex to participate in the right of suffrage, why does not the same apply to man? What claim has he to take part in a business which it would be disreputable for his wife to take part in? If the influence of woman is refining in every other department of life, why have we not a right to suppose that her refining influence would be made apparent in the corrupt department of politics?

When our fathers formed the national Constitution, they made it the duty of the general government to secure to every State a republican form of government. No government can be republican in form, unless it is so in substance and in fact; and that government cannot be republican in form or in fact which is not based upon the consent of the governed; or which denies to one half its citizens all participation in the government. After the troublesome war we have just passed through, we are called upon not only to reconstruct the ten unrepresented States of the nation, but to purify the republicanism of our government and make it more consistent with our professions. It is a fit time, then, to take up the subject of suffrage, and to base it upon a well-established principle. Some say that the right of suffrage is a privilege, to be given or withheld at pleasure. That does not seem to me a very safe foundation for so important a right. It is either a privilege or a natural right. If we recognise it as a natural right we have a peaceable, safe, legal mode of resistance against the disfranchisement of the people. If we admit it to be a privilege to be granted or withheld, no man and no woman has any legal right to interpose any objection to his own disfranchisement. But I see that our friend has come in who was expected first to address you, and I will not take up more of your time.

ADDRESS OF PARKER PILLSBURY.

The resolutions just read refer to the comparative longevity of nations and of individual men, and of their respective performance, while existence lasts.

Among nations, have arisen Franklins and Washingtons, Humboldts and Howards; and these have had their archetypes in the saints and sages, the philosophers and philanthropists of ancient times. But what individual nation of any period, has been the Plato or Pythagoras, the Howard or the Humboldt, the Franklin or Washington of all the 03533rest? or has achieved proportionally, so long a life? or expired at last in sunsets of serenity and glory, and been embalmed and enshrined in the tears and gratitude of mankind? It is often said that the life of a nation is as the life of an individual; with beginning, progress, decay and dissolution. But the resemblance holds only in part. Consciousness comes to an individual, and self-respect; and from that hour growth and greatness (it may be) begin.

But with nations it is not so. Consciousness and self-respect seem not to pertain to mind in masses, more than to matter. Both may become avalanches, sweeping all before them. The world has not made the same demand of nations as of individuals, and so nothing is expected of them. Nations, hitherto, are badly brought up; have had indeed no bringing up. As yet they can be called but the primeval forests of civilization. In the light of a thousand years hence, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be “darker ages” than the eight and ninth are to-day.

Accepting three score and ten as the common life of an individual, a degree at least of honorable manhood is often achieved, both in personal virtues, and in noble performance.

The canticles of the Almanac used to run, “At ten, a child; at twenty, wild; At thirty, strong, if ever; At forty, wise; at fifty, rich; At sixty, good, or never.” But at what age has any nation of any period or place become wise, rich, or even strong; to say nothing of good?

The Roman Catholic Church is older than any civilized government on the globe. Lord Macaulay says, “It is the only institution left standing which carries the mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when tigers and camel leopards bounded in the Flavian Amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, compared with the line of the of the supreme Pontiffs, traced back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond stretches the august dynasty, until it fades into the twilight of fable! She saw the commencement of all the governments on the globe, and of all the ecclesiastical establishments now existing; and there is no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all!”

The world has an accepted chronology of six thousand years. Its history and experience in government reach back forty centuries.

It would be an interesting enquiry with what results governments have existed so long, especially in the later periods and among the most enlightened of the nations.

Germany in the former and Spain in the latter portion of the sixteenth 03634century almost ruled the world. Charles the Fifth boasted that his empire saw no setting sun. It included Spain and all her vast American provinces, over large part of which to-day wave our own Stars ad Stripes.

The national escutcheon bore two globes; and the coin, the two Pillars of Hercules, the then acknowledged boundary of the Eastern world, with the motto “More beyond.”

Spain, too, under Phillip Second, dictated law, learning and religion, especially religion, to unknown millions, not alone in Europe, but in North and South America, Africa and all the Indies. And now in the centre of Europe proper, and remote in its south-western corner, are all that remain there of these two mighty powers of the sixteenth century; figured most appropriately, on the map of the world they once ruled, as two little splashes of blood.

France in the eight century under Charlemagne, was another mistress of the globe. And Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope, “Sovereign of the New Empire of the West.” Distant princes and potentates came to do him homage, like the Queen of Sheba to the court of King Solomon. And yet, in less than fifty years, all that mountain of magnificence exploded; and many rival nations sprang from its lava streams of blood and ashes!

A remnant, too, of France was preserved; and its history for almost eight hundred years, “may be traced, like the tracks of a wounded man, through a crowd, by the blood;” until it culminated in French revolution (“suicide of the eighteenth century,” as Carlyle calls that terrible phenomenon) and Napoleon Bonaparte!

And he also summoned to his coronation the Roman Pontiff, like his great predecessor of a thousand years before. And beneath the solemn arches and arcades of Notre Dame, was crowned by Pope Pius the Seventh— “The high and mighty Napoleon, the first Emperor of the French!”

Plunging remorselessly into the most desolating wars, he soon astonished the civilized world with his successes. He made himself master of almost half the globe, and the terror of all the rest. He gave kingdoms to his four brothers, like baubles, his own vast possessions not feeling their loss. The earthquake that shook down Lisbon and entombed it forever, boiled the whole Atlantic like a cauldron, and stirred the waters of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence as bubbling springs. So, too, the reign of Napoleon was an earthquake, which, for fifteen years, shook the sea and the land, carrying down unnumbered Lisbons and innumerable human lives in the general cataclysm.

But he sunk at last! No triumph like his could be long. No such meteor ever flew its moment across the skies. He aspired to the very heaven of heavens in his ambitions; and his conquests were the wonder and terror of mankind. But he left France smaller, weaker, poorer and 03735more debased and depraved than he found her. Was it not well snug of him, at his overthrow, “Since he, miscalled the Morning Star, Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far!”

Of the later France—especially of its present condition, social and moral, as well as political—enough is well known to subserve all the purposes of this discussion.

Just eight hundred years ago last September, William the Norman landed in Britain and commenced it subjugation. Since that period, the history of Great Britain has not differed materially from that of other European nations. As the sun is said never to set on the British domain, so the thunder of its war-guns has reverberated almost continually in some corner of the globe.

To trace her history, however rapidly, even had we time, could give no pleasure to this audience, and would add nothing to my present argument. It is sufficient to say that, with real estate almost immeasurable, with personal property incalculable, with a wealth of material resources of every conceivable description, absolutely unknown and unknowable, she yet contrives to support her costly establishment by a system of oppressive taxation almost unparalleled in the annals of the human race.

Some of you must remember the graphic but not exaggerated description of British taxation given by Sydney Smith in the Edinburg Review. It was almost fifty years ago; but no less revenue must be raised in some way, still. He said:

“We have taxes upon everything which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the feet; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell or taste; taxes upon warmth, light and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and in the waters under the earth; taxes on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material, taxes on every fresh value added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauces which pamper man's appetite, and the drugs that restore him to health; taxes on the ermine which decorates the judge, and on the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt and the rich man's spice; on the ribbons of the bride, on the shroud of the corpse and the brass nails of the coffin. The school-boy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth rides his taxes horse, with a taxed saddle and bridle, on a taxed road; ad the dying English-man, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen cent, flings himself back upon his chintz-bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel. His virtues are then handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he is gathered to his fathers, to be taxed no more!”

And we are told, what is doubtless true, that the enormous debt of Great Britain is the chain that binds its many parts together, and preserves 03836its nationality. No nation, then, ever maintained a more precarious existence. Chartism in Scotland, Repeal in Ireland, Trades Strikes everywhere, East India Wars, Irish Famines, Fenianism, Reform Leagues, Reform Riots, Bread Riots—all these attest how volcanic is its under stratum, and what dangers impend above.

In some of the gloomy gorges of the Alps, there are seasons of the year when no traveller passes but at the expense of life, on account of the terrible “thunderbolts of snow” that hang suspended on the sides or summits of the mountains. None can know their hour; but descend they must, by all the laws of gravitation, with resistless energy, sweeping all before them. At such times, all who pass creep along with trembling caution. They move in single file, at distance from each other, hurrying fast as possible, with velvet step, avoiding all noise, even whispers—the guides meanwhile muffling the bells of the mules, lest the slightest vibration communicated to the air should untie the tremulous mass overhead and entomb them forever.

Great Britain, with her frightful debt, her terrible taxation, her dissatisfied, restless, beggared myriads of the lower working classes, her remorseless aristocracy, her bloated spirit of castle, her enforced but heartless religion, has hung a more terrible avalanche over her head than ever leaped down the heights of the Tyrol.

Such are examples of success or failure in attempts at government, among the proudest and most prosperous nations of the Old World, in modern and what are called enlightened times.

If seventy years be the life of a man, what should be the life of a nation? Half the children born, die under five years old. But proportionably a greater mortality prevails among nations and governments. Not one nation has ever yet attained an honorable manhood. There is something rotten in the state of every Denmark.

Will you tell me Democracy, Republicanism, consecrated by Christianity, is the remedy for all these ills? Let us look, then, at the best example.

Our own nation is not yet a hundred years old, but it had behind it in the beginning, the chronicles of forty or sixty centuries, written mostly in tears and blood. At the end of an eight years’ revolutionary war, our new governmental columns were reared, not, like some pagan temples, on human skulls, but on the imbruted bodies and extinguished souls of five hundred thousand chattel slaves. We had our Declaration of Independence, our war of Revolution, and a new Constitution and code of laws. We had a Washington for our first President, a John Jay for Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court, and a constellation of senators, statesmen and sages who challenged the respect and admiration of mankind. We closed that dispensation with James Buchanan as Chief Magistrate, and Roger B. Taney as Chief-Justice, with his diabolical Dred Scott Decision, and with a war of Treason and Rebellion which deluged the land in the blood of more than half a million 03937of men. We had multiplied our slaves to four millions, with new cruelties and horrors added to the system, and at least ten generations of them were lost in unknown graves. The new Republican President pledged his official word and honor to the rebels already in arms, that, would they but return to their allegiance, he would favor amendments to the Constitution that should not only render slave property more secure than ever before, but also make all its old guarantees and safeguards, Fugitive Slave law and all, forever “irrevocable” by any act or decree of Congress!

So were we endeavoring to bulwark and balustrade our slave-system about, in the name of a Christian Republicanism, when it was struck by the lightnings of a righteous retribution, and the world is rid of it forever.

And our old nationality went down in the ruin. Now we are divided, distracted, deranged in currency, commerce, diplomacy, with State and Federal liabilities resting on the people, the producing people, amounting to not less than six thousand millions of dollars, not to speak of current expenditures which are also appalling; with a President whose weakness finds no parallel but in his wickedness, with a Secretary of State who has become his full counterpart in both, and a Senate too cowardly, or too corrupt, to impeach the one or to seek the removal of the other!

For more than two years we have been attempting to restore the fragments of our once boasted Union. With the history and experience of forty centuries shining back upon us, so far we have failed. And under any existing or proposed policy we shall fail. By all the claims of justice and righteousness, we deserve to fail; for we are still defying those claims.

The son of Priam, a priest of Apollo, was commissioned to offer a sacrifice to propitiate the god of the sea. But the offering not being acceptable, there came up two enormous serpents from the deep and attacked the priest and his two sons who stood with him at the altar. The father attempted to defend his sons; but the serpents falling upon him, enfolded him and them in their complicated coils, and strangled them to a terrible death. Let this government beware. The very union proposed will only bind and hold us together as in the deadly folds of a serpent more fearful than all the fabled monsters of the past! And so, hitherto, republics are no exception to the general law. Rickets in infancy, convulsions in childhood, or premature rheumatisms, have brought the nations of history to untimely deaths.

Material interests may flourish, and nations grow great and powerful, make wars and conquests, and rule the world. The ancients did all this, but where are those haughty omnipotences now? Charlemagne did but little less, and in half a century his magnificence was brought to nought. Germany and Spain survived a little longer in their glory and grandeur; but now the scanty blood-splash on the map describes them well.

04038

The United States, young among the nations, the mother earth six thousand years old at their birth, wet-nursed by forty centuries of history, and schooled by all the experience of the ages, with almost half a globe for their inheritance, with Christianity their faith and Republicanism their form of government, they survived a precocious childhood and then fell a victim to their own vices and crimes. To-day they are in the hands of many physicians, though of doubtful reputation, who seem far less desirous to cure the patient than to divide and share the estate.

My main point is this—we have had enough of the past in government. It is time to change. Literally almost, more than metaphorically, the “times are rotten ripe.” We come to-day to demand—first an extension of the right of suffrage to every American citizen, of whatever race, complexion or sex.

Manhood or male -hood suffrage is not a remedy for evils such as we wish removed. The Anti-Slavery Society demands that; and so, too, do large numbers of both the political parties. Even Andrew Johnson at first recommended it, in the reconstruction of the rebel States, for three classes of colored men. The New York Herald, in the exuberance of its religious zeal, demanded that “members of Christian Churches” be added as a fourth estate to the three designated by the President.

The Woman's Rights Society contemplated suffrage only for woman. But we, as an Equal Rights Association, recognize no distinctions based on sex, complexion or race. The Ten Commandments know nothing of any such distinctions. No more do we.

The right of suffrage is as old, as sacred and as universal as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is indeed the complement and safeguard of these and all civil and political rights to every citizen. The right to life would be nothing without the right to acquire and possess the means of its support. So it were mockery to talk of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, until the ballot in the hand of every citizen seals and secures it.

The right of the black man to voice in the government was not earned at Olustee or Port Hudson. It was his when life began, not when life was paid for it under the battle-axe of war. It was his with Washington and Jefferson, Jams Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln. Not one of them could ever produce a higher, holier claim. Nor can any of us.

We are prating about giving right of suffrage to black male citizens, are complacently as we once gave our compassion and corn to famishing Ireland. But this famine of freedom and justice exists because we have produced it. Had our fleets and armies robbed Ireland of its last loaf, and left its myriads of inhabitants lean, ghastly skeletons, our charity would not have been more a mockery when we sent them bread to preserve them alive, than it is now when w talk of giving the ballot to those whom God created free and equal with ourselves.

04139

And in the plenitude of our generosity, we even propose to extend the gift to woman also. It is proposed to make educated, cultivated, refined, loyal, tax-paying, government-obeying woman equal to the servants who groom her horses, and scour the pots and pans of her kitchen. Unfortunate beings, without property, and scarcely knowing the English tongue, or any other, are entreated to grant to women, the superior of all the queens of the old world, the right to cooperate with them in the affairs of State. Women here in New York worth thousands and hundreds of thousands in gold, and whose money is the meanest part of their real value in society, are humbly petitioning their coachmen, their footmen and gardeners, the discharged State-prison convicts, the idiots and lunatics, all of whom may and often do exercise the right of the ballot, to permit them also to share with them in making and executing the laws.

Our Maria Mitchells, our Harriet Hosmers, Harriet Beecher Stowes, Lydia Maria Childs,and Lucretia Motts, with millions of the mothers and matrons of quiet homes, where they preside with queenly dignity and grace, are begging of besotted, debauched white male citizens, legal voters, soaked in whiskey, simmered in tobacco, and parboiled in every shameless vice and sin, to recognized them also as human, and graciously accord to them the rights of intelligent beings!

And, singularly enough, in some of the States, it is proposed to grant the prayer. But the wisest and best men have no idea that they are only restoring what they have so long held by force, based on fraud and falsehood. They only propose to give woman the boon which they claim was theirs by heavenly inheritance. But they are too late with their generosity. For God gave that when he gave life and breath, passions, emotions, conscience and will. Give gold, give lands, give honors, give office, give title of nobility, if you must; but talk not giving natural, inalienable and heaven-derived endowments. God alone bestows these. He alone has them to give.

Our trade in right of suffrage is contraband. It is bold buccaneering on the commerce of the moral universe. If we have our neighbor's right of suffrage and citizenship in our keeping, no matter of what color, or race, or sex, then we have stolen goods in our possession; and God's search-warrant will pursue us forever, if those goods be not restored.

And the we impudently assert that “all just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed.” But when was the consent of woman ever asked to one single act on all the statute books?

We talk of “trial by jury of our peers!” In this country of ours, women have been fined, imprisoned, scourged, branded with red hot irons and hung; but when, or where, or for what crime or offence, was ever woman tried by a jury of her pears?

04240

Suffrage was never in the hands of tyrants or of governments, but by usurpation. It was never given by them to any of us. We brought it; not bought it; nor conquered it; nor begged it; nor earned it; nor inherited it. It was man's inalienable, irrepealable, inextinguishable right from the beginning. It is so still; the same yesterday, to-day and while earthly governments last.

It came with the right to see and hear; to breathe and speak; to think and feel; to love and hate; to choose and refuse; or it did not come at all.

The right to see came with the eye and the light; did it not? and the right to breathe, with the lungs and the air; and all these from the same infinite source.

And has not also the moral and spiritual nature its inalienable rights? Have the mere bodily organs, which are but the larder of worms, born of the dust, and dust their destiny—have they power and prerogative that are denied to the reasons, the understanding, the conscience, the will, those attributes which constitute responsibility, accountability and immortality?

Or shall God give the power to choose, or refuse obedience to his law and reign, leaving the human will free as his own; and must mortal man, the mushroom of yesterday and perished to-morrow, usurp a higher and more dreadful prerogative, and compel support of and submission to laws in which the subject has no voice in making, executing or even consenting, on pain of perpetual imprisonment, banishment or death?

Must a brave soldier fight and bleed for the government, and, pruned of limbs, plucked of eyes. and scarred all over with the lead and iron hail of war—must he now hobble on his crutches up to a Republican, Democratic, yes, and a Christian throne, and beg the boon of a ballot in that government, in defence of which he perilled all, and lost all but bare life and breath, only because an African instead of a more indulgent sun looked upon him or his ancestors in their allotment of life? And then, when the claim of immortal manhood is superadded, the inalienable rights of the soul, in and of themselves, the rights of the reason, the understanding, the conscience, the will—what desperation is that which treads down all these claims, and rushes into seats of higher authority than were ever claimed by the eternal God, and denies him that right altogether!

No white male citizens was ever born with three ballots in his hand, one his own by birthright, and to be used without restraint, the others to be granted, given to women and to colored men at his pleasure or convenience! Such an idea should never have outraged our common humanity. And any bill or proposal for what is called “manhood suffrage” while it ignores womanhood suffrage, whether coming from the President or the Republican party and sanctioned by the Anti-Slavery Society, should be repudiated as at war with the whole spirit and genius 04341of a true Democracy, and a deadly stab into the very heart of justice itself.

I have referred to the age of the Roman Catholic Church. Lord Macaulay, in accounting for her astonishing longevity as compared with other institutions, turns with felicitous insight to female influence as one of the principal causes.

In her system, he says, she assigns to devout women spiritual functions, dignities, and even magistracies. In England, if a pious and benevolent woman enter the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her sex, she does so without any authority from the Church. Indeed, the Protestant Church places the ban of its reprobation on any such irregularity. “At Rome, the Countess of Huntington would have a place in the Calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be Foundress and First Superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Jails.”

But even Macaulay overlooks another element of power and permanence in the economy of the Catholic Church. God, as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Ghost, might inspire reverence and dread only, in hearts that, at the shrine of the ever blessed Mary, Mother of God, would kindle into humble, holy and lasting love.

Frances Power Cobbe, though deprecating the doctrine of “Mariolatry,” as she terms the worship of the Virgin, yet says of it, “The Catholic world has found a great truth, that love, motherly tenderness and pity is a divine and holy thing, worthy of adoration. * * * * What does this wide-spread sentiment regarding this new divinity indicate? It can surely only point to the fact that there was something lacking in the elder creed, which, as time went on, became a more and more sensible deficiency, till at last the instinct of the multitude filled it up in this amazing manner.”

When Theodore Parker, in his morning prayer on a beautiful summer Sunday, addressed the All-loving as “Our Father and our Mother,” he struck a chord which will one day vibrate through the heart of universal humanity. It was a thought worth infinitely more than all the creeds of Christendom.

What if woman should even abuse the use of the ballot at first? Man has been known to fail at first in a new pursuit. A marker of microscopes told me that, in a new attempt on a different kind of object-glass, he failed forty-nine times, but the fiftieth was a complete success.

The Poet of Scotland intimates that even Creative Nature herself improved at a second trial: “Her ‘prentice hand she tried on man; And then she made the lasses, o’”

Woman might not vote wisely the first time. She might even re-elect John Morrissey to Congress though Elizabeth Cady Stanton and 04442Horace Greeley were both in the fields as candidates. Politics sometimes make strange revelations, as well as strange bed-fellows.

From of old it was seen and said “it is not good for man to be alone;” the first social sentiment ever uttered, and clearly a divine inspiration. Not a Church in Christendom would survive, made up of male membership alone. It would soon lapse into a hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

The angels in Heaven might not have rebelled had both sexes made up the population. At least we hear of no more discords there, since Eve and her myriads of daughters are swelling the songs and refining the joys.

Must we be told that woman herself does not ask the ballot! Then I submit to such, if such there be, the question is not one of privilege, but of duty—of solemn responsibility. If woman does not desire the ballot, demand it, take it, she sins against her own nature and all the holiest instincts of humanity, and cannot too soon repent.

After all, the question of suffrage is one of justice and right. Unless human government be in itself an unnatural and impious usurpation, whoever renders it support and submission, has a natural and inalienable, imperishable and inextinguishable right, to an equal voice in enacting and executing the laws. Nor can one man, or millions on millions of men acquire or possess the power to withhold that right from the humblest human being of sane mind, but by usurpation, and by rebellion against the constitution of the moral universe. It would be robbery, though the giving of the right should induce all the predicted and dreaded evils of tyrants, cowards and white male citizens.

Be justice done though the heavens fall, and the bells arise instead I Nay, it is only justice, reared as a lightning rod, that can shield any governmental fabric when the very heavens are falling in righteous retribution.

The past mortality must last among nations, so long as they set at nought the Divine economy and purpose in their formation. The human body may yield to decay and die, though the soul be imperishable and eternal. But nations, like souls, need not die. Streams of new life flow into them, like rivers into the sea; and why should not the sea and the nations on its shores, roll on together with the ages?

When governments shall learn to lay their foundations in righteousness, with eternal justice the chief corner-stone; when equal and impartial liberty shall be the acknowledged birthright of all, then will national life begin to be prolonged; and the death of a nation, were it possible, should be as though more than a Pleiad had expired. No more would nation then lift up sword against nation; and the New Jerusalem would indeed descend from God out of heaven and dwell among men.

04543

Susan B. Anthony made an appeal for contributions to the funds of the Association, to enable it to carry on its work, especially in Kansas.

Mrs. Rose was the next speaker, and was received with applause.

ADDRESS OF ERNESTINE L. ROSE.

Mrs. Rose said:

After all, we come down to the root of all evil—to money. It is rather humiliating, after the discourse that we have just heard, that told us of the rise and progress and destruction of nations, of empires and of republics, that we have to come down to dollars and cents. We live in an entirely practical age. I can show you in a few words that if we only had sufficient of that root of all evil in our hands, there would be no need of holding these meetings. We could obtain the elective franchise without making a single speech. Give us one million of dollars, and we will have the elective franchise at the very next session of our Legislature. (Laughter and applause.) But as we have not got a million of dollars, we want a million of voices. There are always two ways of obtaining an object. If we had had the money, we could have bought the Legislature and the elective franchise long before now. But as we have not, we must create a public opinion, and for that we must have voices.

I have always thought I was convinced not only of the necessity but of the great importance of obtaining the elective franchise for woman; but recently I have become convinced that I never felt sufficiently that importance until now. Just read your public papers and see how our Senators and our members of the House are running round through the Southern States to hold meetings, and to deliver public addresses. To whom? To the freedmen. And why now, and why not ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago? Why do they get up meetings for the colored men, and call them fellow-men, brothers, and gentlemen? Because the freedman has that talisman in his hands which the politician is looking after. Don't you perceive, then, the importance of the elective franchise? Perhaps when we have the elective franchise in our hands, these great senators will condescend to inform us too of the importance of obtaining our rights.

You need not be afraid that when woman has the franchise, men will ever disturb her. I presume there are present, as there always are such people, those of timid minds, chicken-hearted, who so admire and respect woman that they are dreadfully afraid lest, when she comes to the ballot-box, rude, uncouth and vulgar men will say something to disturb her. You may set your hearts all at rest. If we once have the elective franchise, upon the first indication that any man will endeavor to disturb a woman in her duty at the polls, Congress will enact another Freedman's Bureau—I beg pardon, a Freedwoman's Bureau—to protect women against men, and to guard the purity of the ballot-box at the same time.

I have sometimes been asked, even by sensible men, “If woman had 04644the elective franchise, would she got to the polls to mix with rude men?” Well, would I go to the church to mix with rude men? And should not the ballot-box be as respectable, and as respected, and as sacred as the church? Aye, infinitely more so, because it is of greater importance. Men can pray in secret, but must vote in public. (Applause.) Hence the ballot, of the two, ought to be the most respected; and it would be if women were once there; but it never will be until they are there.

We have been told this evening that it is not good for man to be alone. No; if it was not well for him to be alone in the garden of Eden, it surely cannot be well for him to be alone at the ballot-box.

Our rights are so old as humanity itself. Yet we are obliged to ask man to give us the ballot, because he has it in his own hands. It is ours, and at the same time we ask for it; and we have sent on petitions to Congress. We have been told that the Republic is not destroyed. It has been destroyed, root and branch, because, if it were not destroyed, there would be no need to reconstruct it. And we have asked Congress, in the reconstruction of the Republic, to place it upon a sound foundation. Why have all former republics vanished out of existence? Simply because they were built upon the sand. In the erection of a building, in proportion to the height of the walls must be the depth and soundness of the foundation. If the foundation is shallow or unsound, the higher you raise your superstructure the surer its downfall. That is the reason a republic has not existed as long as a monarchy, because it embraced principles of human rights in its superstructure which it denied in its foundation. Hence, before this Republic could count a hundred years, it has had one of the mightiest revolutions that ever occurred in any country or in any period of human existence. Its foundation was laid wrong. It made a republic for white men alone. It discriminated against color; it discriminated against woman; and at the same time it pronounced that all men are created free and equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It raised its superstructure to the clouds; and it has fallen as low as any empire could fall. It is divided. A house divided against itself cannot stand. A wrong always operates against itself, and falls back on the wrong-doer. We have proclaimed to the world universal suffrage; but it is universal suffrage with a vengeance attached to it—universal suffrage excluding the negro and the woman, who are by far the largest majority in this country. It is not the majority that rules here, but the minority. White men are in the minority in this nation. White women, black men, and black women con.pose the large majority of the nation. Yet, in spite of this fact, in spite of common sense, in spite of justice, while our members of Congress can prate so long about justice, and human rights, and the rights of the negro, they have not the moral courage to say anything for the rights of woman.

04745

In proportion to power is responsibility. Our Republican senators and members of Congress have taken unto themselves great power. They have made great professions. There is a very good maxim, “Of him to whom much is given, much shall be required.” In proportion to their claims to be friends of human freedom, lovers of human rights, do we demand of them our rights and justice. When Chase, Summer, Stevens, and Wilson talk to the negro of the importance of having the franchise, and stop short of giving the franchise to woman, I proclaim them hypocrites—I proclaim them politicians. They speak so to the newly freed slave, because he has already the ballot in his hands, and they want him to vote for them. We have not that right, and hence they do not speak one word in favor of our attaining the elective franchise. I make no difference between one party and another. All parties are alike to me so far as they are right; and all parties are alike to me so far as they are wrong. For one, I would not be bound by party if I had the franchise in my hand to-day. I would go for my own highest convictions of right, irrespective of party. Perhaps our Senators know that woman would not be such a docile tool in their hands as the newly freed slave, and hence they will not give the ballot to us. If they do think so, they do us justice, because we would not be, you may depend on that.

There are a great many objections urged against the enfranchisement of women; and one that I have recently heard is that women would not go to war. Perhaps, if women had the franchise, men would not need to go to war neither. (Applause.) And this is one great reason why I demand the franchise. War is only a relic of the old barbarisms. So long as woman is deprived of her right, man is only next door to a barbarian. If he were not, he never would go to war. When woman has the franchise she will not want to go to war, and she will not want her husband to go to war; she will not want to have her son or her brother go to war; and none of them will need to go to war. Is war necessary? Are rowdies necessary? Is it necessary for man to be vulgar and corrupt? Is it necessary to disgrace the ballot-box by rows and fightings, so that a woman dare not go within its precincts? Are these things inalienable rights in a republic? Do they belong to the ballot-box? Do they belong to this country? Do they belong to the nineteenth century? For my part, I say, No!

The ballot is a teacher. Henry Ward Beecher, in a discourse on the subject last winter, said, in regard to woman's franchise, that the ballot is a teacher. I am glad to be able to agree with a minister, which is not often the case. Yes, it is a teacher. Yet, when a man alone has the ballot, it fails to be his teacher. It has not taught him the great lesson that the ballot is useless, that it becomes perverted and corrupt, when woman is kept from it.

One of the greatest Grecian philosophers has proclaimed that no one ought to be amenable to the laws of the land that has not voice in 04846enacting the laws. Woman is amenable to our laws. She is punished; she is imprisoned; she is hung; but she has no voice in making the law that imprisons her or hangs her. She is taxed, but she has no voice in the laws that levy the tax. She is judged, but she has no voice in the laws, or in saying who shall judge her. Woman ought to be wherever her duty calls her—at the ballot-box, on the judge's bench, in the jury-box; the lawyer at the bar to plead her own case. Millions of money have been spent, many thousand lives have been lost, to obtain for man the great boon of being judged by his peers. Who are our peers? Are we the same that man is? Then we have the same rights that he has. Are we not the same that he is? Then what right has he to judge us? How can be plead for us? How can be understand the motives of a being so entirely different from himself? There is no justice in it. But it is an old error, and it is very difficult to eradicate it; it cannot be done except by money or by voices.

We have lately read in the papers, to the shame and disgrace of this civilized Republic in the nineteenth century, that the Legislature of New York took into consideration the enactment of laws against a “social evil.” For my part, I never knew a social evil to be removed by force of law. Is there only one kind of social evil? Are there not many kinds? Is there not defalcation, deception, intrigue, swindling, defrauding—the government defrauding the people, and the people defrauding the government and each other? Why, then, not enact laws against these kinds of “social evil?” After you have stopped them, then you may talk about enacting laws to prevent another social evil. The prevention of that social evil must commence in the nursery. If you will bring up woman as you ought to bring up men—not as you do bring up men—acknowledging her right to live the same as men, giving her the same advantages and the same rights that men have, there will be no need to enact laws against a “social evil.” It is a shame to talk about licensing a social evil. It is a shame to this Republic. It is a violation of woman's nature. It is an insult to womanhood; and if woman has one drop of pure blood stirring in her heart, she must revolt against it. At the same time, I say to the Legislature that, if you enact laws against social evils, whatever those laws are, let them be alike for man and for woman. (Applause). If you want to derive a revenue from the corruption of the community, let it be drawn alike from both sexes. The social evil belongs to both; the social remedy must belong to both. Do not degrade woman more than she is already degraded. Perchance she is driven, through your injustice, to that step to maintain her wretched existence, because every avenue of emolument is barred against her; and yet that commits the injustice and takes advantage of her feebleness, her confiding nature, her helpless poverty, and her ignorance, enacts laws against woman and against the social evil! I would rather give the stray lamb into the power of the wolf for protection. (Applause.) Let woman have the franchise; let all the avenues 04947of society be thrown open before her, according to her powers and her capacities, and there will be no need to talk about social evils. Depend upon it that she will not only take care of herself, but will help to take care of man, which is more than he has ever done for himself.

Major James Haggerty said:

It is no new thing for me to be found among Anti-Slavery people. I believe it was among Anti-Slavery people that I received my American culture. I see the old faces here upon this platform and in this house— some that I first met when I landed in this country, in 1856—Parker Pillsbury, as remorseless as ever; Mrs. Stanton, as bold and strong for the truth as ever. I see the same uncompromising people here, and I feel that I have been as uncompromising as any of them; for, although I have been and am identified with the Republican party in politics, no man ever heard me, on any platform, compromise with the rights of another. Woman's Rights is an idea against which my prejudices array themselves; but my logic says, If you would be a true man, you must raise your voice for equal rights. (Applause.) I have seen the effect of the suffrage. In the District of Columbia, during the election, I saw men who had been called doughfaces walk up to black men and profess to be so much more Anti-Slavery than the best Anti-Slavery men, that I have got the idea that it will not be five years before the northern Democrat will be swearing to the black man that he has negro blood in his veins. (Laughter.)

After a few further remarks, Major H. said:

I come upon this platform to-night, then, to identify myself with this new effort. I hope you may prosper; and so far as a dollar of mine, or my voice may go, you shall have it. I confess candidly that it is logic that drives me here, in spite of my prejudices. It is the discourses of Mrs. Stanton, of Mrs. Mott, of others that have spoken and written; and it is coming in contact with strong womanly mind. It would make you laugh to know what I supposed Mrs. Stanton to be before I first saw her. I pictured to myself a very angular old maid, and thought she must be a very bad-looking person; for, to associate a good-looking woman with a strong-minded woman, was to me ridiculous, and I would not do it. I leave you to judge for yourselves how great a corrective to the vagaries of imagination is the experience of actual life. If we accept the convictions that come to us, we shall be all right; and I will do as the lady who has just spoken said that she would do—not be governed by mere party, but by the moral bearings of the questions that arise, and vote upon the side of God and justice. (Applause.)

ADDRESS OF FRANCES D. GAGE.

Frances D. Gage said:

Mrs. President: It seems to be my fate to come in at the eleventh hour. We have been talking about the right to the ballot. Why do we 05048want it? What does it confer? What will it give us? We closed our argument at three o'clock to-day by a discussion whether the women of this country and the colored men of this country wanted the ballot. I said that it was a libel on the womanhood of this country, to say they do not want it; and I repeat that assertion. Woman may say in public that she does not want it, because it is unpopular and unfashionable for her to want it; but when you tell her what the ballot can do, she will always answer you that she wants it. Why do we want it? Because it is right, and because there are wrongs in the community that can be righted in no other way.

After the discussions we have had to-night, I want to turn to a fresh subject. Last evening I attended the meeting of the National Temperance Association at Cooper Institute. A great audience was assembled there, to listen to the arguments against the most gigantic evil that now pervades the American Republic. Men took the position that only a prohibitory law could put an end to the great evil of intemperance. New York has its two hundred millions of invested capital to sell death and destruction to the men of this country who are weak enough to purchase. There are eight thousand licensed liquor establishments in this city, to drag down humanity. It was asserted there by Wendell Phillips that intemperance had its root in our Saxon blood, that demanded a stimulus; and he argued from that standpoint. If intemperance has its root in the Saxon blood, that demands a stimulus, why is it that the womanhood of this nation is not at the grog-shops to-day? Are women not Saxons? It was asserted, both by Mr. Phillips and by President Hopkins, of Union College, that the liquor traffic must be regulated by law. A man may do what he likes in his own house, said they; he may burn his furniture; he may take poison; he may light his cigar with his greenbacks; but if he carries his evil outside of his own house, if he increases my taxes, if he makes it dangerous for me or for my children to walk the streets, then it may be prohibited by law. I was at Harrisburg, a few days ago, at the State Temperance Convention. Horace Greeley asserted that there was progress upon the subject of temperance; and he went back to the time when ardent spirits were drank in the household, when every table had its decanter, and the wife, children and husband drank together. Now, said he, it is a rare thing to find the dram-bottle in the home. It has been put out. But what put the dram-bottle out of the home? It was put out because the education and refinement and power of woman became so strong in the home, that she said, “It must go out; we can't have it here.” (Applause.) Then the voters of the United States, the white male citizens, went to work and licensed these nuisances that could not be in the home, at all the corners of the streets. I demand the ballot for woman to-day, that she may vote down these nuisances, the dram-shops, there also, as she drove them out of the home. (Applause.)

What privilege does the vote give to the “white male citizen” of the 05149United States? Did you ever analyze a voter—hold him up and see what he was? Shall I give you a picture of him? Not as my friend Parker Pillsbury has drawn the picture to-night will I draw it. What is the “white male citizen”—the voter in the Republic of the United States? More than any potentate or any king in all Europe. Louis Napoleon dares not walk the streets of his own city without his bodyguard around him, with their bayonets. The Czar of Russia is afraid for his own life among his people. Kings and potentates are always afraid; but the “free white male citizen” of the United States, with the ballot in his hand, goes where he lists, does what he pleases. He owns himself, his earnings, his genius, his talent, his eloquence, his power, all there is of him. All that God has given him is his, to do with as he pleases, subject to no power but such laws as have an equal bearing upon every other man in like circumstances, and responsible to no power but his own conscience and his God. He builds colleges; he lifts up humanity or he casts it down. He is the lawgiver, the maker, as it were, of the nation. His single vote may turn th destiny of the whole Republic for good or ill. There is no link in the chain of human possibilities that can add one single power to the “white male citizen” of America.

Now we ask that you shall put into the hands of every human soul this same power to go forward and do good works wherever it can. The country has rung within the last few days because one colored girl, with a little black blood in her veins, has been cast out of the Pittsburg Methodist College. It ought to ring until such a thing shall be impossible. But when Cambridge, and Yale, and Union, and Lansing, and all the other institutions of the country, West Point included, aided by national patronage, shut out every woman and every colored man in the land, who has anything to say? There is not a single college instituted by the original government patronage of lands to public schools and colleges, that allows a woman to set her foot inside of its walls as a student. Is this no injustice? Is it no wrong?

When men stand upon the public platform and deliver elaborate essays on women and their right of suffrage, they talk about their weakness, their devotion to fashion and idleness. What else have they given women to do? Almost every profession in the land is filled by men; every college sends forth the men to fill the highest places. When the law said that no married woman should do business in her own name, sue or be sued, own property, own herself or her earnings, what had she to do? That laid the foundation for precisely the state of things you see to-day.

But I deny that, as a class, the women of America, black or white, are idle. We are always busy. What have we done? Look over this audience, go out upon your streets, go through the world where you will, and every human soul you meet is the work of woman. She has given it life; she has educated it, whether for good or evil. She it is that must lie at 05250the foundation of your country, because God gave her the holiest mission ever laid upon the heart of a human soul—the mission of the mother.

We are told that home is woman's sphere. So it is, and man's sphere, too; for I tell you that that is a poor hom which has not in it a man to feel that it is the most sacred place he knows. If duty requires him to go out into the world and flight its battles, who blames him, or puts a ban upon him? Men complain that woman does not love home now, that she is not satisfied with her mission. I answer that this discontent arises out of the one fact, that you have attempted to mould seventeen millions of human souls in one shape, and make them all do one thing. Take away your restrictions, open all doors, leave women at liberty to go where they will. As old Sojourner Truth said twenty years ago, at the first Women's Rights Convention in Ohio, “Leave them where God left them, with their inalienable rights,” and they will adjust themselves to their convictions of their duties, their responsibilities, and their powers, and society will find harmony within itself. The caged bird forgets how to build its nest. The wing of the eagle is as strong to soar to the sun as that of her mate, who never says to her, “back, feeble one, to your nest, and there brood in dull inactivity until I give you permission to leave!” But when her duties called her there, who ever found her unfaithful to her trust? The foot of the wild roe is as strong and swift in the race as that of her antlered companion. She goes by his side, she feeds in the same pasture, drinks from the same running brook, but is ever true also to her maternal duties and cares.

If we are a nation of imbeciles, if womanhood is weak, it is the laws and customs of society which have made us what we are. If you want health, strength, energy, force, temperance, purity, honesty, deal justly with the mothers of this country; then they will give you nobler and stronger men than higgling politicians, or the grogshop emissaries that buy up the votes of your manhood.

Why is it that Republicans are so weak and wavering to-day? There is a law upon the statute book of every southern State that the child shall follow the condition of the mother. There is a law in the physical code of humanity, written by the finger of the Almighty, that never was and never will be repealed, that the child shall follow the condition of the mother. You have never taught the women of this country the sacredness of freedom. You have never called out the mother to generous action. You have never said to the motherhood of this country, “Upon you rests the responsibility of making the Republic what it should be. We invest you with the power; now assume that responsibility and act upon it, or we shall call you to account for your neglect of duty.”

It has been charged upon woman that she does nothing well. What have you given us to do well? What freedom have you give us to act independently and earnestly? When I was in San Domingo, I found a little colony of American colored people that went ever there is 1825. 05351They retained their American customs, and especially their little American church, outside of the Catholic, which overspread the whole country. In an obscure room in an old ruin they sung the old hymns, and lived the old life of the United States. I asked how this thing was, and they answered that among those that went over so long ago were a few from Chester County, Penn., who were brought up among the Quakers, and had learned to read. Wherever a mother had learned to read, she had educated all her children so that they could read; but wherever there was a mother that could not read, that family had lapsed off from the old customs of the past.

Give us education. When we have a right to vote, there will not be a school-door in the United States shut to woman. When we have the right to vote, I believe that the womanhood that demanded that the dram-bottle should go out of the home, will demand that the dram-bottle shall be put away from among men. She will say, You have no right to take poison, and make my home a discomfort, or destroy the greenbacks, which should be the mutual possession of the household, by lighting your cigar. She will tell the world, under the new regime, that it is not the Saxon blood that demands a stimulant; but in the new morality it will be as wicked for a man to be drunken as for a woman to be drunken— as disreputable for a man to be licentious as for a woman to be licentious— as wicked and perverse for a man to go down to the lower depths of iniquity and folly as for a woman. And the great law uttered upon Sinai amid its thunders, will again be remembered, and will apply as much to man as to woman. Now, it is not so. One code of morality governs the voter, another the woman. As the slaveholder enacted laws that made his own vices crimes in the slave, so men enact laws that make their vices crimes in woman. And this is why we want suffrage for woman.

I ask the ballot, not because of its individual advantage to myself, but because I know and feel that individual rights, guaranteed to every citizen, must harmonize the world, if there is any power to do it this side of heaven. And so, not quite eighty years old, as old Sojourner said she was, but standing upon the brink of threescore, having looked this question in the face from my girlhood up— having labored in almost every vocation in life that falls to the lot of womanhood, as a worker on the farm, a worker in the household, a wife, a mother, a seamstress, a cook— and I tell you, my friends, that I can make better biscuit than I can lectures— as one who has tried to study what is for the best interest of society, I ask you candidly to survey this subject in all its bearings. Why may we not take our position as human beings enjoying all the privileges which the Creator bestowed, without restriction other than falls upon every other human being in the community?

A friend of mine, writing from Charleston the other day, just after the ballot went down there, says that he was told by a colored man, “I met my old master, and he bowed so low to me I did'nt hardly know 05452which was the negro and which was the white man.” When we hold the ballot, we shall stand just there. Men will forget to tell us that politics are degrading. They will bow low, and actually respect the women to whom they now talk platitudes; and silly flatteries, sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, ruby lips, the soft and delicate hands of refinement and beauty, will not be the burden of their song; but the strength, the power, the energy, the force, the intellect and the nerve, which the womanhood of this country will bring to bear, and which will infuse itself through all the ranks of society, must make all its men and women wiser and better. (Applause.)

The Association then adjourned until Friday morning, 10½ o'clock.

SPEECH OF REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER.

Henry Ward Beecher said:

It seems that my modesty in not lending my name has been a matter of some grief. I will try hereafter to be less modest. When I get my growth I hope to overcome that. I certainly should not have been present 05856to-day, except that a friend said to me that some who were expected had not come. When a cause is well launched and is prospering, I never feel specially called to help it. When a cause that I believe to be just is in minority, and is struggling for a hearing, then I should always be glad to be counted among those who were laboring for it in the days when it lacked friends.

I come to bear testimony, not as, if I had not already done it, but again, as confirmed by all that I have read, whether of things written in England or spoken in america, in the belief that this movement is not the mere progeny of a fitful and feverish Ism—that it is not a mere frothing eddy whose spirit is but the chafing of the water upon the rock—but that it is a part of that great tide which follows the follows the drawing of heaven itself. I believe it to be so. I trust that it will not be invidious if I say, therefore, I hope the friends of this cause will not fall out by the way. If the division of opinion amounts merely to this, that you have two blades, and therefore can cut, I have no objection to it; but if there is such a division of opinion in respect to mere details, however important those details are, among friends that are one at the bottom where principles are, that there is to be a falling out there, I shall exceedingly regret it; I shall regret that our strength is weakened, when we need it to be augmented most, or concentrated.

All my lifetime the great trouble has been that in merely speculative things theologians have been such furious logicians, have picked up their premises, and rushed with them with race-horse speed to such remote conclusions, that in the region of ideas our logical minds have become accustomed to draw results as remote as the very eternities from any premises given. My difficulty, on the other hand, has been that in practical matters, owing to the existence of this great mephitic swamp of slavery, man have been utterly unwilling to draw conclusions at all; and that the most familiar principles of political economy or politics have been enunciated, and then always docked off short. Men would not allow them to go to their natural results, in the class of questions in society. We have had raised up before us the necessity of maintaining the Union by denying conclusions. The most dear and sacred and animating principles of religion have been restrained, because they would have such a bearing upon slavery, and men felt bound to hold their peace. Our most profound and broadly acknowledged principles of liberty have been enunciated and passed over, without carrying them out and applying them to society, because it would interrupt the peace of the nation. That time is passed away; and as the result of it has come in a joy and a perfect appetite on the part of the public.

I have been a careful observer for more than thirty-five years, for I came into public life, I believe, about the same time with the lady who has just sat down (Mrs. Foster), although I am not so much worn by my labors as she seems to have been. For thirty-five years I have observed 05957in society its impetus checked, and a kind of lethargy and deadness in practical ethics arising, from fear of this prejudicial effect upon public economy. I have noticed that in the last five year there has been a revolution as perfect as if it had been God's resurrection in thee graveyard. The dead men are living, and the live men are thrice alive. I can scarcely express my sense of the leap the public mind and the public moral sense have taken within this time. The barrier is out of the way. That which made the American mind untrue logically to itself is smitten down by the hand of God; and there is just at this time an immense tendency in the public mind to carry out all principles to their legitimate conclusions, go where they will. There never was a time when men were so practical, and so ready to learn. I am not a farmer, but I know that the spring comes but once in the year. When the furrow is open is the time to put in your seed, if you would gather a harvest in its season. Now, when the red-hot ploughshare of war has opened a furrow in this nation, is the time to put in the seed. If any man says to me, “Why will you agitate the woman's question, when it is the hour for the black man?” I answer, it is the hour for every man, black or white. (Applause.) The bees go out in the morning to gather the honey from the morning-glories. They take it when they are open, for by ten o'clock they are shut, and they never open again until the next crop comes. When the public mind is open, if you have anything to say, say it. If you have any radical principles to urge, any organizing wisdom to make known, don't wait until quiet times come. Don't wait until the public mind shuts up altogether.

War has opened the way for impulse to extend itself. But progress goes by periods, by jumps and spurts. We are in the favored hour; and if you have great principles to make known, this is the time to advance those principles. If you can organize them into institutions, this is the time to organize them. I therefore say, whatever truth is to be known for the next fifty years in this nation let it be spoken now—let it be enforced now.

The truth that I have to urge is not that women have the right of suffrage—not that Chinamen or Irishmen have the right of suffrage—not that native born Yankees have the right of suffrage—but that suffrage is the inherent right of mankind. I say that man has the right of suffrage as I say that man has the right to himself. For although it may not be true under the Russian government, where the government does not rest on the people, and although under our own government a man has not a right to himself, except in accordance with the spirit and action of our own institutions, yet our institutions make the government depend on the people, and make the people depend on the government; and no man is a full citizen, or fully competent to take care of himself, or to defend himself, that has not all those rights that belong to his fellows. I therefore advocate no sectional rights, no class rights, no sex rights, but the most universal form of 06058right for all that live and breathe on the continent. I do not put back the black man's emancipation; nor do I put back for a single day or for an hour his admission. I ask not that he should wait. I demand that this work shall be done, not upon the ground that it is politically expedient now to enfranchise black men; but I propose that you take expediency out of the way, and that you put a principle that is more enduring than expediency in the place of it—manhood and womanhood suffrage for all.

That is the question. You may just as well meet it now as at any other time. You never will have so favorable an occasion, so sympathetic a heart, never a public reason so willing to be convinced as to-day. If anything is to be done for the black man, or the black woman, or for the disfranchised classes among the whites, let it be done, in the name of God, while his Providence says, “Come; come all, and come welcome.”

But I take wisdom from some with whom I have not always trained. If you would get ten steps, has been the practical philosophy of some who are not here to-day, demand twenty, and then you will get ten. Now even if I were to confine—as I by no means do—my expectation to gaining the vote for the black man, I think we should be much more likely to gain that by demanding the vote for everybody. I remember that when I was a boy Dr. Spurzheim came to this country to advocate phrenology, but everybody held up both hands—“Phrenology! You must be running mad to have the idea that phrenology can be true!” It was not long after, that mesmerism came along; and then the people said, “Mesmerism! We can go phrenology; there is some sense in that; but as for mesmerism—!” Very soon spiritualism made its appearance, and then the same people began to say, “Spiritualism! why it is nothing but mesmerism; we can believe in that; but as for spiritualism—!” (Laughter.) The way to get a man to take a position is to take one in advance of it, and then he will drop into the one you want him to take. So that if, being crafty, I desire to catch men with guile, and desire them to adopt suffrage for colored men, as good a trap as I know of is to claim it for women also. Bait your trap with the white women, and I think you will catch the black man. (Laughter.) I would not, certainly, have it understood that we are standing here to advocate this universal application of the principle merely to secure the enfranchisement of the colored citizen. We do it in good faith. I believe it is just as easy to carry the enfranchisement of all as the enfranchisement of any class, and easier to carry it than carry the enfranchisement of class after class—class after class. (Applause.)

I make this demand because I have the deepest sense of what is before us. We have entered upon an era such as never before has come to any nation. We are at a point in the history of the world where we need a prophet, and have none to describe to us those events rising in the horizon, thick and fast. Sometimes it seems to me that that Latter 06159Day glory which the prophets dimly saw, and which saints have ever since, with faintness of heart, longed for and prayed for with wavering faith, is just before us. I see the fountains of the great deep broken up. I think we are to have a nation born in a day among us, greater in power of thought, greater in power of conscience, greater therefore in self-government, greater still in the power of material development. Such thrift, such skill, such enterprise, such power of self-sustentation I think is about to be developed, to say nothing of the advance already made before the nations, as will surprise even the most sanguine and far-sighted.

Nevertheless, while so much is promised, there are all the attendant evils. It is serious thing to bring unwashed, uncombed, untutored men, scarcely redeemed from savagery to the ballot-box. It is a dangerous thing to bring the foreigner, whose whole secular education was under the throne of the tyrant, and put his hand upon the helm of affairs in this free nation. It is a dangerous thing to bring men without property, or the expectation of it, into the legislative halls to legislate upon property. It is a dangerous thing to bring woman, unaccustomed to and undrilled in the art of government, suddenly into the field to vote. These are dangerous things; I admit it. But I think God says to us, “By that danger I put every man of you under the solemn responsibility of preparing these persons effectually for their citizenship.” Are you a rich man, afraid of your money? By that fear you are called to educate the men who you are afraid will vote against you. We are in a time of danger. I say to the top of society, just as sure as you despise the bottom, you shall be left like the oak tree that rebelled against its own roots—better that it be struck with lighting. Take a man from the top of society or the bottom, and if you will but give himself to himself, give him his reason, his moral nature, and his affections; take him with all his passions and his appetites, and develop him, and you will find he has the same instinct for self-government that you have. God made a man just as much to govern himself as a pyramid to stand on its own bottom. Self-government is a boon intended for all. This is shown in the very organization of the human mind, with its counterbalances and checks. It certainly will be given to all; and I am not afraid that all should have it, provided they are unbound, developed to more liberty, and made more familiar with themselves. If those who are up in the privileged seats are afraid of those at the bottom then turn to and become school-teachers. Go to work and teach them.

For my own part, I do not despise the lowly. I thank God for them, as I thank God for those who repose on their literary laurels. My heart warms for everything God makes, whether worm or insect—whether it flies in the air, or swims in the sea, or walks upon the earth, and surely for everything that carries immortality in its bosom. My heart warms for those who have touched the summer of prosperity. They are my natural fellows; and if I sought simply congeniality, with them would I 06260walk. But when brought into that other state of benevolence, which penetrated the bosom of the Saviour, then they who are not favored are more the objects of my concern. Then do I labor more willingly and more earnestly for the fallen and the oppressed, that I may lift them up. Nor do I know any Christianity in this age of the world which does not give its broad shoulders with patient strength, always lifting— lifting—those that need some other than their own strength, to raise them up to the place where God designed them to live. In this spirit there is no antagonism between the favored classes and the unfavored. We are underpinning and undergirding society. Let us put under it no political expediency, but the great principle of manhood and womanhood, not merely cheating ourselves by a partial measure, but carrying the nation forward to its great and illustrious future, in which it will enjoy more safety, more dignity, more sublime proportions, and a health that will know no death. (Applause.)

Henry C. Wright said that circumstances had made Wendell Phillips and others, leaders in the Anti-Slavery movement, as they had made Mrs. Stanton and others leaders in this; and while they all desired the enfranchisement of both classes, it was no more than right that each should devote his energies to his own movement. There need not be, and should not be any antagonism between the two.

Miss Anthony said—The question is not is this or that person right, but what are the principles under discussion. As I understand the difference between Abolitionists, some think this is harvest time for the black man, and seed-sowing time for woman. Others, with whom I agree, think we have been sowing the seed of individual rights, the foundation idea of a republic for the last century, and that this is the harvest time for all citizens who pay taxes, obey the laws and are loyal to the government. (Applause.)

Mr. Remond said: In an hour like this I repudiate the idea of expediency. All I ask for myself I claim for my wife and sister. Let our action be based upon the rock of everlasting principle. No class of citizens in this country can be deprived of the ballot without injuring every other class. I see how equality of suffrage in the State of New York is necessary to maintain emancipation in South Carolina. Do not moral principles, like water, seek a common level? Slavery in the Southern States crushed the right of free speech in Massachusetts and made slaves of Saxon men and women, just as the $250 qualification in the Constitution of this State, degrades and enslaves black men all over the Union.

The resolution offered by Mr. Downing not having been seconded, was passed over without action.

Mr. Pillsbury protested against the use of the few last moments of this meeting in these discussions. We should be now only “a committee of ways and means,” and future work should be the business in hand. Mr. Downing presented an unnecessary issue. Government is never 06361going to ask us which should enter into citizenship first, the women or the colored men, or whether we prefer one to the other. Indeed government has given the colored man the ballot already. We are demanding suffrage equally, not unequally. Mrs. Stanton's private opinion, be it what it may, has nothing to do with the general question. The white voters are mostly opposed to woman's suffrage. So will the colored men be, probably; at least so she believes, as Mrs. Mott also suggested very strongly, and a million or more of them added to the present opposition and indifference, are not a slight consideration. Mrs. Stanton does not believe in loving her neighbor better than herself. Justice to one class does not mean injustice to another. Woman has as good a right to the ballot as the black man—no better. Were I a colored man, and had reason to believe that should woman obtain her rights she would use them to the prejudice of mine, how could I labor very zealously in her behalf? It should be enough for Mr. Downing and all who stand with him that Mrs. Stanton does not demand one thing for herself as to rights, or time of obtaining them, which she does not cheerfully, earnestly demand for all others, regardless of color or sex.

Miss Anthony read the following telegram from Lucy Stone: “Atchison, Kansas, May 10, 1867.

Impartial Suffrage, without regard to color or sex, will succeed by overwhelming majorities. Kansas rules the world! Lucy Stone.”

Miss Anthony also read a hopeful and interesting letter from Hon. S. M. Wood, of Kansas, showing his plans for the canvass of that State.

Josephine Griffing said: I am well satisfied that this Convention ought not to adjourn until a similar plan is laid out for all the States of this Union, and especially for the District of Columbia. This being a national convention, it seems peculiarly appropriate that it should begin its work at the District of Columbia. The proposition has already been made there, and the parties have discussed its merits. The question of the franchise arose from the great fact that at the South there were four millions of people unrepresented. The fact of woman's being also unrepresented is now becoming slowly understood. It is easier now to talk and act upon that subject in the District of Columbia than ever before, or than it will be again. Even the President has said that if woman in the District of Columbia shall intelligently ask for the right of franchise, he shall by no means veto it. To my mind the enfranchisement of woman is a settled fact. We cannot reconstruct this government until the franchise shall be given not merely to the four millions, but to the fifteen millions. We cannot successfully reconstruct our government, unless we go to the foundation. Let us apply all the force we can to the lever, for we have a great body to lift. No matter how ready the public is, we can accomplish nothing unless we have some plan, and unless we have workers. I presume none of us are aware how many laws there are upon the statute books 06462disabling to our rights. When the Judges in the District of Columbia were to decide who were to vote and who were not to vote, the question arose who could be appointed officers of the city; and it was found that there was a law that no one could be appointed a judge of elections who had not paid a tax upon real estate in the District of Columbia, a law which almost defeats all the work which has been done during the canvass of the last eight weeks in that District. There is work yet to be done there, and so we shall find it at every step. I am thankful with all my heart and soul that the people have at last consented to the enfranchisement of the two millions of black men. I recognize that, as the load is raised one inch, we must work by degrees, accepting every inch, every hair's breadth gained towards the right. I welcome the enfranchisement of the negro as a step towards the enfranchisement of woman.

Miss Anthony said we seem to be blessed with telegrams, with cheering news from Kansas, and read the following telegram from S. M. Wood: Kansas, May 10, 1867.

“With the help of God and Lucy Stone, we shall carry Kansas! The world moves!

Sam. Wood.”

These telegrams were received with much applause.

The resolutions were then put to vote, and unanimously carried.

The following officers were elected for the ensuing year:

President.

Lucretia Mott.

Vice-Presidents.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, N. Y.

Frederick Douglass, N. Y.

Henry Ward Beecher, N. Y.

Charles Lenox Remond, Mass.

Elizabeth B. Chace, R. I.

C. Prince, Conn.

Frances D. Gage, N. J.

Robert Purvis, Penn.

Josephine S. Griffing, D. C.

Thomas Garret, Del.

Stephen H. Camp, Ohio.

Euphenia Cochrane, Mich.

Mary A. Livermore, Ill.

Mrs. Isaac H. Sturgeon, Mo.

Amelia Bloomer, Iowa.

Sam. M. Wood, Kansas.

Virginia Penny, Kentucky.

Recording Secretaries.

Henry B. Blackwell,

Hattie Purvis.

Corresponding Secretaries.

Susan B. Anthony,

Mattie Griffith,

Caroline M. Severance.

Treasurer.

John J. Merritt.

06563

Executive Committee.

Edwin A. Studwell,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

Martha C. Wright,

Lucy Stone,

Parker Pillsbury,

Elizabeth Gay,

Theodore Tilton,

Mary F. Gilbert,

Edward S. Bunker,

Antoinette Brown Blackwell,

Susan B. Anthony,

Margaret E. Winchester,

Aaron M. Powell,

James Haggerty,

George T. Downing.

Sojourner Truth was called for and said: I am glad to see that men are getting their rights, but I want women to get theirs, and while the water is stirring I will step into the pool. Now that there is a great stir about colored men's getting their rights is the time for women to step in and have theirs. I am sometimes told that “Women ain't fit to vote. Why, don't you know that a woman had seven devils in her: and do you suppose a woman is fit to rule the nation?” Seven devils ain't no account; a man had a legion in him. (Great laughter.) The devils didn't know where to go; and so they asked that they might go into the swine. They thought that was as good a place as they came out from. (Renewed laughter.) They didn't ask to go into sheep—no, into the hog; that was the selfishest beast; and man is so selfish that he has got women's rights and his own too, and yet he won't give women their rights. He keeps them all to himself. If a woman did have seven devils, see how lovely she was when they were cast out, how much she loved Jesus, how she followed him. When the devils were gone out of the man, he wanted to follow Jesus, too, but Jesus told him to go home, and didn't seem to want to have him round. And when the men went to look for Jesus at the sepulchre they didn't stop long enough to find out whether he was there or not; but Mary stood there and waited, and said to him, thinking it was the gardener, “Tell me where they have laid him and I will carry him away.” See what a spirit there is. Just so let women be true to this object, and the truth will reign triumphant.

Alfred H. Love (President of the Universal Peace Society) said: Your President paid the Universal Peace Society two visits; and some of us, in turn, are here to reciprocate. The Universal Peace Society, knowing that we must have purity before we can have peace, knowing that we need our mother, wives and daughters with us, knowing that we need the morality, the courage, and the patience of the colored man with us, adopted as our first resolution that the ballot is a peacemaker, and that with equality there can be no war; and in another resolution we have said that women and colored men are entitled to the ballot. Therefore, you have us upon the same platform, working for you in the best way we can. We mean no cowardly peace; we mean such a peace as demands justice and equality, and world-wide philanthropy. I put 06664the ballot of to-day under my foot, and say I cannot use it until the mother that reared me can have the same the privilege; until the colored man, who is my equal, can have it.

E. H. Heywood, of Boston, said he could hardly see what business men had upon this platform, considering how largely responsible they are for the conditions against which women struggle, except to confess their sins. Men had usurped the government, and shut up women in the kitchen. It was a sad fact that woman did not speak for herself. It was because she was crowded so low that she could not speak. Woman wanted not merely the right to vote, but the right to labor. The average life of the factory girl in Lowell was only four years, as shown by a legislative investigation. New avenues for labor must be opened.

Mr. Heywood further remarked, it was said that the women on this platform were coquetting with the Democrats. Why shouldn't they? The Democrats take the true position. He had heard a Democrat say, “Talk of negro suffrage, and then refuse women the right to vote. All I have to say is, when the negroes of Connecticut go to the polls, my wife and daughter will go, too.”

ADDRESS OF FRANCES D. GAGE.

It is not to-day as it was before the war. It is not to-day as it was before woman took her destiny in her hand and went out upon the battle-fields, and into the camp, and endured hunger and cold for the sake of her country. The whole country has been vitalized by this war. What if woman did not carry the bayonet on the battle-field? She carried that which gave more strength and energy. Travelling through Illinois, I saw the women bind the sheaf, bring in the harvest, and plow the fields, that men might fight the battles. When such women come up now and ask for the right of suffrage, who will deny their request?

In the winter of 1859, the law was passed in New York giving to married women the right to their own earnings. It was said frequently then that women did not want the right to their own earnings. We were asked if we wanted to create separation in families. But did any revolution or any special trouble grow out from this recognition of woman's right? You see women everywhere to-day earnestly striving to find a place to earn their bread. Madame Demorest has become a leader of fashion, teaching women to make up what Stewart imports; 06765and she has a branch establishment in every large city in the Union clear to Montana. I do not know but some of those ladies cutting out garments, and setting the fashions of the day, might aspire to the Presidential chair; and perhaps they would be quite as capable as the present incumbent—a tailor. (Applause.)

The complaint comes up everywhere that woman is wedded to frivolity, and fashion, and idleness. Was there ever so busy a nation of human souls as our nation of women to-day? Within three months they have put on new trimmings, and turned their dresses inside out and upside down, and the whole country has been at work, as bees work in the hive, getting things ready for summer wear. Is this idleness? And why do they do this? Simply because the doors to more profitable employment are closed, and they have nothing else to do. Give them a chance to earn five dollars a day in honorable work, and crocheting would go by the board. Give woman the ballot, and no medical college will refuse her admission or deny her a diploma. Give woman the ballot, and every avenue of industry, everything that can give strength and life to her soul, will be as open to her as to man.

Three years ago I found myself without the means of life. I wanted a home. I had read about the beauties of a home, and woman's appropriate sphere; and so I got a little home, and went into it, and tried to get work. My old eyes would not see to sew nicely, I was too feeble to wash, and so I tended the garden. After a year had gone by I found that staying in this beautiful home, and placing myself in woman's sphere, had not brought me a dollar to pay my bills. So setting all these theories at defiance, I said I will go and lecture; and I went out into the lecturing field. I have money to pay my bills to-day; but I could not have it were I to cling to the sphere of home.

If a woman is doing the work of a good man's home, she is doing her part, and she will not desire to go out from it for any ordinary cause. But if she can make two dollars to his one, allowing him to carry out his part of the appointments of life, why should not she do it? When we can be allowed to do the thousand things that womanly hands can do as well as those of men, we shall make our lives useful. But take my word for it, as an old mother, with her grandchildren gathered about her, you will not find woman deserting the highest instincts of her nature, or leaving the home of her husband and children.

Why do you scold us, poor weak women, for being fashionable and dressy, when snares are set at every corner to tempt us? What would become of your dry-goods merchants and your commerce if we did not wear handsome dresses—if the women of this country were to become thus sensible to-day? Your great stores on Broadway would be closed, and your stalwart six-feet men would have to find something else to do besides measuring tapes and ribbons. The whole country would undergo a transformation. But it would be better for the country. It would not take five years to pay the national debt, interest and all, if 06866you will apply the money spent by men for tobacco and whiskey—if men will learn to be decent. I think it is a great deal better to wear a pretty flower or ribbon than to smoke cigars. It is a great deal better, and less damaging to the conscience, to wear a handsome silk dress, than for a man to put “an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains.”

I honestly and conscientiously believe that we ought to make the rights of humanity equal for all classes of the community of adult years and of sound mind. I do not ask that the girl should vote at eighteen, because she should not be her own woman until she is twenty-one—at the same age with the boy; and having raised both boys and girls, I think I have a right to say that. Give us freedom from these miserable prejudices, these restrictions and tyrannies of society, and let us judge for ourselves. If it is true, as science asserts, that girls inherit more of the character of their father, while the boys follow in a more direct line their mother, then how is it possible that women should not have the same aspirations as men? I was born a mechanic, and made a barrel before I was ten years old. The cooper told my father, “Fanny made that barrel, and has done it quicker and better than any boy I have had after six months’ training.” My father looked at it and said, “What a pity that you were not born a boy, so that you could be good for something. Run into the house, child, and go to knitting.” So I went and knit stockings, and my father hired an apprentice boy, and paid him two dollars a week for making barrels. Now, I was born to make barrels, but they would not let me. Thousands of girls are born with mechanical fingers. Thousands of girls have a muscular development that could do the work of the world as well as men; and there are thousands of men born to effeminacy and weakness.

Mrs. Stanton then addressed the meeting. As her line of argument was a summary of that recently made before the Judiciary Committee of the Legislature, and already published, it need not here be repeated.

Miss Anthony announced that they would have another opportunity to hear Sojourner Truth, and, for the information of those who did not know, she would say that Sojourner was for forty years a slave in this State. She is not a product of the barbarism of South Carolina, but of the barbarism of New York, and one of her fingers was chopped off by her cruel master in a moment of anger.

ADDRESS OF SOJOURNER TRUTH

Sojourner, having deposited her hood and likewise the miraculous bag containing her rations, “shadows,” and other “traps,” came forward good naturedly and said:

Well, things that past a good while, there's no use over-calling them again. Old things is passed away, and all things are become new, (Applause and laughter.) I was sitting and looking around here—I've been to a great many conventions, a great many meetin's in the course 06967of my life-time—in eighty years, and I've heard a great many speeches, but I've heard a great many answers in the anti-slavery meetin's. A half dozen would pop up, some pop up here, some there. But in this meetin’ there has been nobody to pop up. (Laughter and applause.) Nobody to gainsay.

I havn't seen any one grumblin'. I never heard a meetin’ before but there was great grumblin’ and mutterin’ goin’ on. (Laughter.) Now, I say we are gainin’ ground. Haven't you noticed; here is antislavery women—a great many kinds; and did you ever behold a meetin’ and see so many people together—both male and female; the body of the church full; and every one's countenance looks pleasin’, looks pleasant. (Laughter.) It seems to me it's all coming right. Every one feels it's right and good. Why, I've been in meetin's and heard men gabble, gabble, gabble; but now it seems to me all pleasant. Why, this war has done a great deal of good, besides doing a great deal of harm. (Laughter.) People seem to feel more for one another. Certainly I never saw so many people together and nobody tryin’ to hurt anybody's feelin's. (Applause and laughter.) I guess there's those here that's been to meetin's and heard it. Women has been here talkin’, and throwin’ out arrows—there was nobody gettin’ mad, or if they was they didn't let us know it. (Laughter.)

Well, Sojourner has lived on through all the scenes that have taken place these forty years in the anti-slavery cause, and I have plead with all the force I had that the day might come that the colored people might own their soul and body. Well, the day has come, although it came through blood. It makes no difference how it came—it did come. (Applause.) I am sorry it came in that way. We are now trying for liberty that requires no blood—that women shall have their rights—not rights from you. Give them what belongs to them; they ask it kindly too. (Laughter.) I ask it kindly.

Now, I want it done very quick. It can be done in a few years. How good it would be. I would like to go up to the polls myself. (Laughter.) I own a little house in Battle Creek, Michigan. Well, every year I got a tax to pay. Taxes, you see, be taxes. Well, a road tax sounds large. Road tax, school tax, and all these things.

Well, there was women there had a house as well as I. They taxed them to build a road, and they went on the road and worked. It took ‘em a good while to get a stamp up. (Laughter.) Now, that shows that women can work. If they can dig up stumps they can vote. (Laughter) It is easier to vote than dig stumps. (Laughter.) It doesn't hard work to vote, though I have been some men that had a hard of it. (Laughter.) But I believe that when women can vote be so many men that have a rough time gettin’ to the polls. . There is danger of their life sometimes, I guess in this city.

are in this city. I don't want to take up time . 07068I calculate to live. Now if you want me to get out of the world, you had better get the women votin’ soon. (Laughter.) I shan't go ‘till I can do that. I think it will come along pretty soon. (Laughter.) Now I think I will sing a little bit. I sung the other night, and my singin'—well, they can't put things down on paper as we speak, though I speak in an unknown tongue. (Laughter.) Now, what I sing they ain't got it in the right way—not in the way I meant it. I am king of poet—what do you call it that makes poetry? I can't read it, but I can make it.

You see I have sung in the anti-slavery meetin's and in the religious meetin's. We, they didn't call anti-slavery religious, and so I didn't call my song an anti-slavery song—called it religious, so I could make it answer for both. (Great laughter.) Now I want the editors to put it down right. I heard it read from the ‘paper, but it don't sound as if they had it right.

Sojourner then sang her song.

ADDRESS OF CHARLES LENOX REMOND.

Charles Lenox Remond said:

It requires a rash man to rise at this stage of the meeting, with the hope of detaining the audience even for a few moments. But in response to your call I rise to add my humble word to the many eloquent words already uttered in favor of universal suffrage. The present moment is one of no ordinary interest. Since this platform is the only place in this country where the whole question of human rights may now be considered, it seemed to me fitting that the right of the colored man to a vote, should have a place at the close of the meeting; and especially in this State, since the men who are to compose the Convention called for the amendment of the Constitution of this State, will, within a few short weeks, pass either favorably or unfavorably upon that subject. I remember that Henry B. Stanton once said at a foreign Court, “Let it be understood that I came from a country where every man is a sovereign.” At that time the language of our friend was but a glittering generality, for there were very many who could not be styled sovereigns in any sense of the term. But I desire that the remark of Mr. Stanton shall be verified in the State of New York this very year. I demand that you so amend your Constitution as to recognize the equality of the black man at the ballot-box, at least until he shall have proved himself a detriment to the interest and welfare of our common country. It is no novelty that two colored men were members of the last Legislature of Massachusetts; for more than forty years ago a black man was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature. People seem to have forgotten our past history. The first blood shed in the Revolutionary war ran from the veins of a black man; and it is remarkable that the first blood shed in the recent rebellion also ran from the veins of a black man. What does it mean, that black men, first and foremost in the defence of the American nation and in devotion 07169to the country, are to-day disfranchised in the State of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay? As long as I can remember, colored men have voted in the State of Massachusetts; and I desire that the State of New York shall take her stand by its side. I cannot rebuke the recent slaveholder and rebel for his conduct towards my brethren in the South so long as New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania disfranchise them. God grant that out of the approaching Constitutional Convention may come an influence that shall revolutionize this State; for I believe that when New York shall set itself right on the record, we shall have no trouble with any other State within the Union. Reconstruction begins at home. I an not here to make an appeal in behalf of the character of the colored men of this country. I do not pretend that every colored man is a philosopher, a philanthropist, or a statesman. If you ask me how colored men would look in the American Congress, I will remind you how some white men have looked there. I demand, in the name of everything dear to us as Americans, and dear to us as democrats, that we may lay aside our prejudices, and dare in the light of the past to do our whole duty on this subject of emancipation and reconstruction. It is not enough that you change the legal condition of the slave. If you would make him a worthy citizen of the Republic, you must treat him as a man. Let New York place itself right upon this record, and then no man living in this State will have occasion to be ashamed of it. And if the Southern States shall refuse, when you have set the example, to do their duty, the blame will be at their doors, and not at yours. If I am an humble advocate of the cause in which I have spoken this evening, it is because in my reading of the history of your own State and the lives of some of its great men, I learned that Alexander Hamilton, on the one hand, and John Jay, on the other, were members of Abolition Societies many years ago; and I asked how it is that the citizens of this State, endorsing the character of these gentlemen in every other respect, could take exception to their anti-slavery character. God grant that the spirit and practice of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay may so influence the action of their sons in the coming Constitutional Convention as to make New York a genuine republic that shall know neither race, color, or sex, that all her citizens may stand equal before the law.