f the whole world is turned to this
question of suffrage, and women themselves are throwing off the
lethargy of ages, and in England, France, Germany, Switzerland,
and Russia are holding their conventions, and their rulers are
everywhere giving them a respectful hearing, shall American
statesmen, claiming to be liberal, so amend their constitutions
as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of
unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, butchers, and
barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South, and the
effete civilizations of the Old World? While poets and
philosophers, statesmen and men of science are all alike pointing
to woman as the new hope for the redemption of the race, shall
the freest Government on the earth be the first to establish an
aristocracy based on sex alone? to exalt ignorance above
education, vice above virtue, brutality and barbarism above
refinement and religion? Not since God first called light out of
darkness and order out of chaos, was there ever made so base a
proposition as "manhood suffrage" in this American Republic,
after all the discussions we have had on human rights in the
last century. On all the blackest pages of history there is no
record of an act like this, in any nation, where native born
citizens, having the same religion, speaking the same language,
equal to their rulers in wealth, family, and education, have been
politically ostracised by their own countrymen, outlawed with
savages, and subjected to the government of outside barbarians.
Remember the Fifteenth Amendment takes in a larger population
than the 2,000,000 black men on the Southern plantation. It takes
in all the foreigners daily landing in our eastern cities, the
Chinese crowding our western shores, the inhabitants of Alaska,
and all those western isles that will soon be ours. American
statesmen may flatter themselves that by superior intelligence
and political sagacity the higher orders of men will always
govern, but when the ignorant foreign vote already holds the
balance of power in all the large cities by sheer force of
numbers, it is simply a question of impulse or passion, bribery
or fraud, how our elections will be carried. When the highest
offices in the gift of the people are bought and sold in Wall