which they are to be governed, and if they are not to have opened
to them all proper fields of labor, they will turn their
attention to dressmaking, and to millinery, and to all the other
hot-beds of our fast modern life. It is doing great harm; and
that is one reason I earnestly plead in their behalf for the
ballot. Men say women shall not have the ballot. They must
petition and beg for it. Have not petitions been already made?
Have not 200,000 names been sent in to Congress already? Then
they say you must "organize;" and when that is done, and they
find the country rocked as by a traveling volcano, they then
say, "All women do not want to vote; all the women in the country
should ask for it, and beg for it, and petition for it."

Let me relate an incident that occurred in Boston at the office
of Chief Justice Chapman, four or five weeks ago. A man, a
guardian, came there with a writ of _habeas corpus_, which placed
in his charge two children in no wise related to him, and he
asked that he might have the control of the children, in
opposition to the claim of their mother, who desired to keep
them. The facts were briefly these: the woman had been happily
married; her husband died and left her a widow with two young
children. By the laws of the State of Massachusetts at that time,
she was not allowed to be their guardian, nor the guardian of any
body else's children. So the Judge of Probate appointed a
guardian for the children, who magnanimously allowed them to
remain in their mother's care. After two or three years she
committed the unpardonable crime of marrying again, a thing that
no man was ever guilty of. The marriage was perfectly acceptable
to her former husband's relatives, but the guardian was so
displeased with it, that he got out a writ of _habeas corpus_,
and demanded of Chief Justice Chapman that the children be
remanded to his custody. We are apt to boast of Massachusetts and
its laws, but here was a case in which the Chief Justice, after
hearing the case, actually remanded these children to the
possession of that man. The court-room was crowded; the
excitement was intense; the poor mother sank down in a deadly
faint. I say such laws are an outrage upon womanhood, and they
arise simply and solely from a deep contempt for womanho