sir, here is a New York mother, who trained
her son in fidelity to God and to his country. When that country
called, they answered. Mother and son gave, each after his kind,
their whole service to defend her. By the sad fate of war the boy
is thrown into the ghastly den at Andersonville. Mad with thirst,
he crawls in the pitiless sun toward a muddy pool. He reaches the
dead-line, and is shot by the guard--murdered for fidelity to his
country. "I demand amnesty for that guard, I demand that he shall
vote," cries the honorable Chairman of the Committee. I do not
say that it is an unwise demand. But I ask him, I ask you, sir, I
ask every honorable and patriotic man in this State, upon what
conceivable ground of justice, expediency, or common sense shall
we give the ballot to the New York boy's murderer and refuse it
to his mother?

Mr. Chairman, I have thus stated what I conceive to be the
essential reasonableness of the amendment which I have offered.
It is not good for man to be alone. United with woman in the
creation of human society, their rights and interests in its
government are identical, nor can the highest and truest
development of society be reasonably conceived, so long as one
sex assumes to prescribe limits to the scope and functions of the
other. The test of civilization is the position of women. Where
they are wholly slaves, man is wholly barbarous; and the measure
of progress from barbarism to civilization is the recognition of
their equal right with man to an unconstrained development.
Therefore, when Mr. Mill unrolls his petition in Parliament to
secure the political equality of women, it bears the names of
those English men and women whose thoughts foretell the course of
civilization. The measure which the report of the Committee
declares to be radically revolutionary and perilous to the very
functions of sex, is described by the most sagacious of living
political philosophers as reasonable, conservative, necessary,
and inevitable; and he obtains for it seventy-three votes in the
same House in which out of about the same whole number of voters
Charles James Fox, the idol of the British Whigs, used to be able
to rally only forty votes against the policy of Pitt. The dawn in
England will soon be day here. Before the American pri