to our present demand does not
legitimately thrust on you the final consideration of the whole
broad question of suffrage, on which many of you may be
unprepared to give an opinion. The simple point we now press is
this: that in a revision of our Constitution, when the State is,
as it were, resolved into its original elements, ALL THE PEOPLE
should be represented in the Convention which is to enact the
laws by which they are to be governed the next twenty years.
Women and negroes, being seven-twelfths of the people, are a
majority; and according to our republican theory, are the
rightful rulers of the nation. In this view of the case,
honorable gentlemen, is it not a very unpretending demand we
make, that we shall vote once in twenty years in revising and
amending our State Constitution?

But, say you, the majority of women do not make the demand. Grant
it. What then? When you proclaimed emancipation, did you go to
slaveholders and ask if a majority of them were in favor of
freeing their slaves? When you ring the changes on "negro
suffrage" from Maine to California, have you proof positive that
a majority of the freedmen demand the ballot? On the contrary,
knowing that the very existence of republican institutions
depends on the virtue, education and equality of the people, did
you not, as wise statesmen, legislate in all these cases for the
highest good of the individual and the nation? We ask that the
same far-seeing wisdom may guide your decision on the question
now before you. Remember, the gay and fashionable throng who
whisper in the ears of statesmen, judges, lawyers, merchants,
"_We have all the rights we want_," are but the mummies of
civilization, to be brought back to life only by earthquakes and
revolutions. Would you know what is in the soul of woman, ask not
the wives and daughters of merchant princes; but the creators of
wealth--those who earn their bread by honest toil--those who, by
a turn in the wheel of fortune, stand face to face with the stern
realities of life.

"If you would enslave a people," says Cicero, "first, through
ease and luxury, make them effeminate." When you subsidize labor
to your selfish interests, there is ever a healthy resistance.
But, when you exalt weakness and imbecility above your heads,