SUFFRAGE FOR WOMAN.

Addresses made at the Tenth Woman's Rights Convention at Cooper Institute, New York, May 10 and 11, 1861.

R. PRESIDENT, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN: I wish I

could carry on the same strain of remark which has just been addressed to you, for that touches the very heart of the question which brings us together this morning. We are seeking to change certain laws,laws based on sex. Now, as he has suggested, there is another realm beside that of law, there is another arena beside the civil, and that is the social state. We arrange certain matters of the statute-book; we let other matters arrange themselves, according to what we call fashion and unfettered public opinion, that is, society. We may gather a very distinct idea of what would be the natural result in civil affairs, if we look for a moment at what has been the result of the conflict of powers in the social state, for there power works out untrammelled its natural result. Majorities do not rule there, but real power, the agreeable, the fit, the useful, that which commends itself to the best sense.

Social life began centuries ago, just where legal life stands to-day. It began with the recognition of man. only. Woman was nothing; she was a drudge; she was a toy; she was a chattel; she was a connecting link between man and the brute. That is Oriental civilization. We drift westward, into the sunlight of Chris

tianity and European civilization, and as Milton paints animal life freeing itself from the clod, and tells us, you recollect, of the tawny lion, with his mane and fore-feet liberated, pawing to get free his hinder parts, so the! mental has gradually freed itself from the incumbrance of the animal, and we come round to a society based on, thought, based on soul. What is the result? Why, it would be idle to say that there woman is man's equal; she is his superior. In social life she has taken the lead; she dictates. Hers is this realm, and from her judgment there is no appeal. Her intellect summoned literature into being, almost; as a reader she has demanded that it shall be decent; and now she takes her pen as a writer, and controls the world, as the sceptre of genius always controls it, no matter what lips, male or female, God's living coal has touched.

That, I say, is the counterpart, the picture, that represents to us what law and the civil state are to undergo in their successive changes. We are here to-day only to endeavor to enforce on the consideration of the civil state those elements of power which have already made a social state. You do not find it necessary to-day to say to a husband: "Your wife has a right to read;" or necessary to say to Dickens," You have as many women over your pages as men." You do not find it necessary to say to the male members of a church that the women members have a right to change their creed. All that is settled; nobody contests it. If a man stood up here and said, "I am a Calvinist, and therefore my wife is bound to be one," you would send him to a lunatic asylum. You would say, "Poor man! don't judge him by what he says; he does n't mean it." But law is halting back just where that old civilization was; we want to change it.

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanati

cism about it. We are merely extending the area of liberty, nothing else. We have made great progress. The law passed in your State at the last session of the legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You cannot stop with an inconsistent statutebook. A man is uneasy who is inconsistent. As old Fuller says, "You cannot make one side of the face laugh, and the other cry!" You cannot have one half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian; one half the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have granted that women may be hung, therefore you must grant that women may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed; therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation, and this is, in fact, all that we claim - the whole of it.

Now I want to consider some of the objections that are made to this claim. Men say: "Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know enough; she has not sense enough to vote." I take this idea of the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim for this reason, because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under republican institutions. The rule of despotism is that one class is made to protect the other; that the rich, the noble, the educated, are a sort of Probate Court, to take care of the poor, the ignorant, and the common classes. Our fathers got rid of all that. They knocked it in the head by the simple principle that no class is safe, unless government is so arranged that each class has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics. The Briton says to the poor man: "Be content! I am worth five millions and I will protect you;" America says: "Thank you, sir; I had rather take care of myself!" and that is the essence

It is the corner-stone of

of democracy. [Applause.] progress also, because, the moment you have admitted that poor, ignorant heart as an element of the government, able to mould your institutions, those five millions. of dollars feel that their cradle is not safe and their life is in peril, unless that heart is bulwarked with education and informed with morality; selfishness dictates that wealth and education should do its utmost to educate poverty and hold up weakness, -- and that is the philosophy of democratic institutions. [Applause.]

I am speaking in a republic which admits the principle that the poor are not to be protected by the rich, but to have the means of protecting themselves. So, too, with the ignorant; so, too, with races. The Irish are not to

trust to the sense of justice in the Saxon; the German is not to trust to the native-born citizen; the Catholic is not to trust to the Protestant: but all sects, all classes, are to hold in their own hands the sceptre the American sceptre of the ballot, which protects each class. We claim it, therefore, for woman. The reply is that woman has not sense enough. If she has not, so much the more shame for your public schools, - educate her! If God did not give her mind enough, then you are brutes; for you say to her: "Madam, you have sense enough to earn your own living, - don't come to us!" You make her earn her own bread, and if she has sense enough to do that, she has enough to say whether Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take one cent out of every hundred to pay for fire-works. When you hold her up in both hands and say: "Let me work for you! Don't move one of your dainty fingers! We will pour wealth into your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, all ye daughters of Eve!"- then you will be consistent in saying that woman has not sense enough to vote; but if she has sense enough to work, to depend

for her bread on her work, she has sense enough to vote.

Then, again, men say, "She is so different from man that God did not mean she should vote." Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. [Applause.] One of two things is true: She is either exactly like man, exactly like him, teetotally like him, and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her as well as him; or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her. If she is like me, so much like me, that I know just as well how to vote for her as she knows how to vote for herself, then, the very basis of the ballot-box being capacity, she, being the same as I, has the same right to vote; and if she is so different that she has a different range of avocations and powers and capacities, then it is necessary she should go into the legislature, and with her own voice say what she wants, and write her wishes into statute-books, because nobody is able to interpret her. Choose which horn of the dilemma you please, for on the one or the other, the question of the right of woman to vote must hang.

It is exactly the question of races. You might as well say that the Irishman is not like the Saxon; that the Hindoo is not like the Englishman, the world admits that they are not. Races are different; therefore, the German may well say, "You are a Yankee, with a soul curbed in a sixpence; you are not capable of voting for me. Your whole past and present are different from mine, and when I come to be an element in your civilization, I must shoot up my peaks into the highest land of legislative and civil life, because I want to be represented there as well as you."

I do not think woman is identical with man. I think if she was, marriage would be a very stupid state. God made the races and sexes the complement one of the