t
bare-necked in hot theatres to be studied through
pocket-telescopes until midnight by any one who chooses, how can
their high and holy mission be harmed by their quietly dropping a
ballot in a box? What is the high and holy mission of any woman
but to be the best and most efficient human being possible? To
enlarge the sphere of duty and the range of responsibility, where
there are adequate power and intelligence, is to heighten, not to
lessen, the holiness of life.

But if women vote, they must sit on juries. Why not? Nothing is
plainer than that thousands of women who are tried every year as
criminals are not tried by their peers. And if a woman is bad
enough to commit a heinous crime, must we absurdly assume that
women are too good to know that there is such a crime? If they
may not sit on juries, certainly they ought not to be witnesses.
A note in Howell's State Trials, to which my attention was drawn
by one of my distinguished colleagues in the convention, quotes
an ancient work, "Probation by Witnesses," by Sir George
Mackenzie, in which he says: "The reason why women are excluded
from witnessing must be either that they are subject to too much
compassion, and so ought not to be more received in criminal
cases than in civil cases; or else the law was unwilling to
trouble them, and thought it might learn them too much
confidence, and make them subject to too much familiarity with
men and strangers, if they were necessitated to vague up and down
at all courts upon all occasions." Hume says this rule was held
as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. But if too
much familiarity with men be so pernicious, are men so pure that
they alone should make laws for women, and so honorable that they
alone should try women for breaking them? It is within a very few
years at the Liverpool Assizes in a case involving peculiar
evidence, that Mr. Russell said: "The evidence of women is, in
some respects, superior to that of men. Their power of judging of
minute details is better, and when there are more than two facts
and something be wanting, their intuitions supply the
deficiency." "And precisely the qualities which fit them to give
evidence," says Mrs. Dall, to whom we owe this fact, "fit them to
sift and test it."

But, the obj