for if they should be able to muster a regiment it
would be necessary to go out of the State to find room to drill.
But regiments were raised and they stood side by side with those
of Ohio during the great struggle, and your record is theirs.
Rhode Island, too, stands shoulder to shoulder with Ohio in the
cause of woman suffrage. The call for this Convention was signed
by the representatives of twenty-five States; that for, the
Woman's Rights Convention, in 1850, was signed by those of but
six, yet Ohio and Rhode Island were two of that number. I do not
blush at the smallness of my State, but I rejoice in its
prominence in this movement. I am glad to claim her as the only
State which stands as a unit in the Senate of the United States
in favor of giving the ballot to woman. Messrs. Sprague and
Anthony, the Senators from that State, agree upon this point,
although if they ever agreed upon any other matter, I never heard
of it.

Fellow-delegates and citizens, we have come together as
supporters of a grand reformatory movement, and there is but one
plain course for us to pursue. Some years ago I attended a
meeting of progressive Friends, in Pennsylvania. The subject of
Woman's Rights came up for discussion, and opinions were
expressed pro and con, when suddenly there came striding up the
aisle an awkward boy, half-witted and about half-drunk. He
stepped to the platform, flung his cap to the floor, and said
that he wanted to give his testimony. "I don't know much about
this subject or any other, but my mother was a woman!" The boys
in the galleries laughed, and the Quakers, sitting with their
hats on their heads, looking as solemn as if the funeral of the
whole human race was being held and they were the chief mourners,
did not relax a muscle of their faces, but thought I to myself,
"That overgrown boy, drunk or sober, has solved the whole
question." Women may doubt and hesitate, uncertain whether they
want to vote or not, but men have only one position to take--to
withdraw their opposition, and leave it to the women to decide
for themselves.

Many intelligent and respectable ladies fear a conspiracy against
their freedom--imagining that at times of elections detachments
of police would seize and rudely drag the weak, fainting sisters