be dignified with any
consideration as an exception. But now a frenzied party is
clamoring to have suffrage given to the negro, while they not
only raise no voice for female suffrage, but frown upon and repel
every movement and utterance in its favor. Who of the advocates
of negro suffrage, in Congress or out of it, dare to stand forth
and proclaim to the manhood of America, that the free negroes are
fitter and more competent to exercise transcendent political
power, the right of suffrage, than their mothers, their wives,
their sisters, and their daughters? The great God who created all
the races and in every race gave to man woman, never intended
that woman should take part in national government among any
people, or that the negro, the lowest, should ever have
co-ordinate and equal power with the highest, the white race, in
any government, national or domestic. To woman in every race He
gave correlative, and as high, as necessary, and as essential,
but different faculties and attributes, intellectual and moral,
as He gave to man in the same race; and to both, those adapted to
the equally important but different parts which they were to play
in the dramatic destinies of their people. The instincts, the
teachings of the distinct and differing, but harmonious organism
of each, led man and woman in every race and people and nation
and tribe, savage and civilized, in all countries and ages of the
world, to choose their natural, appropriate, and peculiar field
of labor and effort. Man assumed the direction of government and
war, woman of the domestic and family affairs and the care and
the training of the child; and each have always acquiesced in
this partition and choice. It has been so from the beginning,
throughout the whole history of man, and it will continue to be
so to the end, because it is in conformity to nature and its
laws, and is sustained and confirmed by the experience and reason
of six thousand years.

I therefore, Mr. President, am decidedly and earnestly opposed to
the amendment moved by my friend from Pennsylvania. There is no
man more deeply impressed with or more highly appreciates the
important offices which woman exercises over the destiny of race
than I do. I concede that woman, by her teachings and influence,
is the