hat every type and shade of
degraded, ignorant manhood should be enfranchised, before even
the higher classes of womanhood should be admitted to the polls.
This does not surprise us. Men always judge more wisely of
objective wrongs and oppressions, than of those in which they are
themselves involved. Tyranny on a Southern plantation is far more
easily seen by white men at the North than the wrongs of the
women of their own households.

Then, again, when men have devoted their lives to one reform,
there is a natural feeling of pride, as well as an earnest
principle, in seeing that one thing accomplished. Hence, in
criticising such good and noble men as Gerrit Smith and Wendell
Phillips for their apathy on woman's enfranchisement at this
hour, it is not because we think their course at all remarkable,
nor that we have the least hope of influencing them, but simply
to rouse the women of the country to the fact that they must not
look to these men as their champions at this hour. While
philosophy and science alike point to woman as the new power
destined to redeem the world, how can Mr. Smith fail to see that
it is just this we need to restore honor and virtue in the
Government? There is sex in the spiritual as well as the
physical, and what we need to-day in government, in the world of
morals and thought, is the recognition of the feminine element,
as it is this alone that can hold the masculine in check.

Again; Mr. Smith refuses to sign the petition because he thinks
to press the broader question of "universal suffrage" would
defeat the partial one of "manhood suffrage"; in other words, to
demand protection for woman against her oppressors, would
jeopardize the black man's chance of securing protection against
his oppressors. If it is a question of precedence merely, on what
principle of justice or courtesy should woman yield her right of
enfranchisement to the negro? If men can not be trusted to
legislate for their own sex, how can they legislate for the
opposite sex, of whose wants and needs they know nothing? It has
always been considered good philosophy in pressing any measure to
claim the uttermost in order to get something. Being in Ireland
at the time of the Repeal excitement, we asked Daniel O'Connell
one day if he expected to se