tly exclude any class of persons or any person
whatever from a voice in the Government, unless it can be clearly
established that their participation in political power would be
dangerous to the State; and, therefore, the honorable gentleman
from Kings was logically correct in opposing the enfranchisement
of the colored population, upon the ground that they were an
inferior race, of limited intelligence, a kind of Chimpanzee at
best. I think, however, sir, the honorable and scholarly
gentleman--even he--will admit, that at Pillow, at Milliken's
Bend, at Fort Wagner, the Chimpanzees did uncommonly well; yes,
sir, as gloriously and immortally as our own fathers at Bunker
Hill and Saratoga. "There ought to be no pariahs," says John
Stuart Mill, "in a full grown and civilized nation; no persons
disqualified except through their own default.... Every one is
degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without
consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate
his destiny." "No arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be
permanently satisfactory in which any person or class is
peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not
open to all persons of full age who desire it." (Rep. G., p.
167.) And Thomas Hare, one of the acutest of living political
thinkers, says that in all cases where a woman fulfills the
qualification which is imposed upon a man, "there is no sound
reason for excluding her from the parliamentary franchise. The
exclusion is probably a remnant of the feudal law, and is not in
harmony with the other civil institutions of the country. There
would be great propriety in celebrating a reign which has been
productive of so much moral benefit by the abolition of an
anomaly which is so entirely without any justifiable foundation."
(Hare, p. 280.)

The Chairman of the Committee asked Miss Anthony, the other
evening, whether, if suffrage was a natural right, it could be
denied to children. Her answer seemed to me perfectly
satisfactory. She said simply, "All that we ask is an equal and
not an arbitrary regulation. If _you_ have the right, _we_ have
it." The honorable Chairman would hardly deny that to regulate
the exercise of a right according to obvious reason and
experience is one thing, to den