causes of disqualification. In this
country the whole foundation of our institutions has been that
the male sex when arrived at years of supposed discretion alone
should take part in the political control of the country.

It is not necessary for me to speak now of other influences than
those that come from politics; it is not necessary for me to
dwell upon the actual and potential influences that control the
fate of men and of nations. We all know they are not those most
apparent. We all know it is the passions, the affections, the
sympathies, and desires of the human heart and human ambition
that control the vote, and not the vote that controls them. And
now you propose to try an "experiment" upon a community composed
of your own fellow-citizens, which is in defiance of all human
experience, all suggestions of philosophy, of your own laws, and
of every lesson you should have drawn from every civilized nation
that has preceded you.

Under the operation of this Amendment, what will become of the
family hearthstone around which cluster the very best influences
of human education? You will have a family with two heads--a
"house divided against itself." You will no longer have that
healthful and necessary subordination of wife to husband, and
that unity of relationship which is required by a true and a real
Christian marriage. You will have substituted a system of
contention and difference warring against the laws of nature
herself, and attempting by these new fangled, petty, puny, and
most contemptible contrivances, organized in defiance of the best
lessons of human experience, to confuse, impede, and disarrange
the palpable will of the Creator of the world. I can see in this
proposition for female suffrage the end of all that home life and
education which are the best nursery for a nation's virtue. I can
see in all these attempts to invade the relations between man and
wife, to establish differences, to declare those to be two whom
God hath declared to be one, elements of chaotic disorder,
elements of destruction to all those things which are, after all,
our best reliance for a good and a pure and an honest government.

As I said, Mr. President, I rose simply to express my
astonishment that a measure of this kind could have received the