teen millions of the nation, as would the
proposed amendments of Messrs. Sumner and Wilson. And these
Massachusetts Senators are called the foremost workers in the ranks of
liberty's grand army. If these are the foremost, Heaven save us from
those in the rear! Why does Mr. Boutwell try to make it appear that he
believes that governments, to be founded on justice, should obtain
"the consent of the governed," when he believes the consent of only
one-half the governed should be obtained? when he classes adults as
fully capable of exercising an enlightened judgment as himself with
infants? If Mr. Greeley thinks it right for one-half the people to
represent the wants, and speak as they may think best for the other
half, that other half having no choice in the matter, he must admit,
if he have a tithe of the sense of justice attributed to him, that it
would be only fair to let each half take their turn--the men
expressing the public sense a part of the time, then the women--thus
alternating between the two, in order to balance the scales of justice
with perfect equilibrium.

It seems rather a difficult matter for men to appreciate the fact that
women are ordinary human beings, with the wants and reasoning
faculties of the same. If women lived on the plane where sword and
cannon are resorted to for the procuring of justice, men might then
see the necessity of establishing equality of rights for all. But the
power of women lies in spiritual, not in brute force; therefore men
have failed to comprehend them, or to see the necessity of granting
rights that are not contested at the point of the bayonet. Add to this
the ambitious but weak love of power--of having some one to
rule--inherent in the natures of most men, and the causes of woman's
bondage are pretty clear. In the light of the developments of
the past few months it is plain that the most thorough faced
abolitionists--those who wax eloquent for the negro--are as much in
favor of continuing the slavery of women as were Southern planters of
continuing negro slavery. There are a few exceptions to this, and but
a few.

Even the Boston _Commonwealth_, perhaps as radical a paper as any now
published, and which favors suffrage for women, is a good illustration
of the difficulty of the most liberal-minded men seeing this question
in its true light; for, in its issue of February 24, it says that
"suffrage for women is not a political necessity of a republican
government."

The