e who are in favor
of the extension of suffrage to females can answer what has been
said in this Chamber, and they can answer it triumphantly; and
you will eventually be obliged to take other grounds than those
which have been here stated. From the beginning of this debate
there has been either an open or an implied concession of the
principle upon which the extension of suffrage is asked; and that
is, that there is some natural right or propriety in extending it
further than it was extended by those who formed our State and
Federal Constitutions; that there is some principle of right or
of propriety involved which now appeals powerfully to us in favor
of extended and liberal action in behalf of those large classes
who have been hitherto disfranchised; upon whom the right of
suffrage has not been heretofore conferred.

Having made this concession upon the fundamental ground of the
inquiry, or at all events intimated it, the opponents of an
extended franchise pass on to particular arguments of
inconvenience or inexpediency as constituting the grounds of
their opposition.

Now, sir, I venture to say that those who resist the extension of
suffrage in this country will be unsuccessful in their
opposition; they will be overborne, unless they assume grounds of
a more commanding character than those which they have here
maintained. This subject of the extension of suffrage must be put
upon practical grounds and extricated from the sophisms of
theoretical reasoning. Gentlemen must get out of the domain of
theory. They must come back again to those principles of action
upon which our fathers proceeded in framing our constitutional
system. They lodged suffrage in this country simply in those whom
they thought most worthy and most fit to exercise it. They did
not proceed upon those humanitarian theories which have since
obtained and which now seem to have taken a considerable hold on
the public mind. They were practical men, and acted with
reference to the history and experience of mankind. They were no
metaphysicians; they were not reformers in the modern sense of
the term; they were men who based their political action upon the
experience of mankind, and upon those practical reflections with
reference to men and things in which they had indulged