s more important that woman should
vote than that the black man should vote._ It is important that
he should vote, that the principle may be vindicated, and that
humanity may be defended; but it is important that woman should
vote, not for her sake. She will derive benefit from voting; but
it is not on a selfish ground that I claim the right of suffrage
for her. It is God's growing and least disclosed idea of a true
human society that man and woman should not be divorced in
political affairs any more than they are in religious and social
affairs. I claim that women should vote because society will
never know its last estate and true glory until you accept God's
edict and God's command--long raked over and covered in the
dust--until you bring it out, and lift it up, and read this one
of God's Ten Commandments, written, if not on stone, yet in the
very heart and structure of mankind, _Let those that God joined
together not be put asunder_. (Applause.)

When men converse with me on the subject of suffrage, or the
vote, it seems to me that the terminology withdraws their minds
from the depth and breadth of the case to the mere instruments.
Many of the objections that are urged against woman's voting are
objections against the mechanical and physical act of suffrage.
It is true that all the forces of society, in their final
political deliverance, must needs be born through the vote, in
our structure of government. In England it is not so. It was one
of the things to be learned there that the unvoting population on
any question in which they are interested and united are more
powerful than all the voting population or legislation. The
English Parliament, if they believed to-day that every working
man in Great Britain staked his life on the issues of universal
suffrage, would not dare a month to deny it. For when a nation's
foundations are on a class of men that do not vote, and its
throne stands on forces that are coiled up and liable at any time
to break forth to its overthrow, it is a question whether it is
safe to provoke the exertion of those forces or not. With us,
where all men vote, government is safe; because, if a thing is
once settled by a fair vote, we will go to war rather than give
it up. As when Lincoln was elected, if an election is v