needed for her
protection. If the 40,000 drunkards' wives in this State have the
necessary functions to provide food, clothes, and shelter for
worthless husbands and helpless children, they have the necessary
functions to go to the polls and vote for such social and
sanitary laws as shall end the vice of intemperance.

"But," says the Committee, "this measure would disturb relations
as venerable as government itself."

So said objectors twenty years ago in this State when woman was
first secured in her rights of property. Some of our must
distinguished lawyers prophesied a social convulsion on the
adoption of that measure. But it came without earthquake or
tornado. In a single hour, by a stroke of the pen, the women of
the Empire State were crowned property-holders. But only those
who had felt the iron teeth of the law took note of the onward
legislation. It was a mighty wave on the shores of progress, that
made scarce a ripple on the surface, washing the feet of the
lonely traveler on the sand, though unheeded by the multitude on
the bosom of its waters.

The ballot in the hand of woman will bring neither the millennium
nor pandemonium the next day; but it will surely right many
wrongs. It will open to her the colleges, the professions, the
profitable and honorable walks of life, and give her better wages
for her work. In securing to woman self-respect, independence and
power, we shall purify and exalt our social relations. Helpless
and dependent, woman must ever be the victim of society. "Give a
man a right over my subsistence," says Alexander Hamilton, "and
he has a right over my whole moral being."

February 13, 1868, Mr. Graves offered a resolution: "That the article
on suffrage be recommitted to be revised, by striking out the word
'male' after the word 'every' in the first line of Section 1, Article
II."

Mr. GRAVES said: In offering this resolution I am not unmindful
of the opinion that has been expressed in this Convention on the
question. Yet, sir, I see a willingness expressed on all sides,
to extend the suffrage to the black man at the South and the
equally ignorant foreigner, alike without education, without
knowledge of our laws and Constitution, incapable of appreciating
the genius of republican institutions, and who, neither by