cure a repeal of the Union. "Oh, no!"
said he, "but I claim everything that I may be sure of getting
something." But their intense interest in the negro blinded our
former champions so that they forsook principle for policy, and
in giving woman the cold shoulder raised a more deadly opposition
to the negro than any we had yet encountered, creating an
antagonism between him and the very element most needed to be
propitiated in his behalf. It was this feeling that defeated
"negro suffrage" in Kansas.

But Mr. Smith abandons the principle clearly involved, and
intrenches himself on policy. He would undoubtedly plead the
necessity of the ballot for the negro at the south for his
protection, and point us to innumerable acts of cruelty he
suffers to-day. But all these things fall as heavily on the women
of the black race, yea far more so, for no man can ever know the
deep, the damning degradation to which woman is subject in her
youth, in helplessness and poverty. The enfranchisement of the
men of her race, Mr. Smith would say, is her protection. Our
Saxon men have held the ballot in this country for a century, and
what honest man can claim that it has been used for woman's
protection? Alas! we have given the very hey day of our life to
undoing the cruel and unjust laws that the men of New York had
made for their own mothers, wives, and daughters.

As to the "rights of races," on which so much stress is laid just
now, we have listened to debates in anti-slavery conventions, for
twenty years or more, and we never heard Gerrit Smith plead the
negro cause on any lower ground than his manhood; his individual,
inalienable right to freedom and equality, and thus, we conjure
every thoughtful man to plead woman's cause to-day. Politicians
will find, when they come to test this question of "negro
supremacy" in the several States, that there is a far stronger
feeling among the women of the nation than they supposed. We
doubt whether a constitutional amendment securing "manhood
suffrage" alone could be fairly passed in a single State in this
Union. Women everywhere are waking up to their own God-given
rights, to their true dignity as citizens of a republic, as
mothers of the race.

Although those who demand "woman's suffrage" on principle are
few