It is in vain to look for a genuine republic in this country
until the women are baptized into the idea, until they understand
the genius of our institutions, until they study the science of
government, until they hold the ballot in their hands and have a
direct voice in our legislation. What is the reason, with the
argument in favor of the enfranchisement of women all on one
side, without an opponent worthy of consideration--while British
statesmen, even, are discussing this question--the Northern men
are so dumb and dogged, manifesting a studied indifference to
what they can neither answer nor prevent? What is the reason that
even abolitionists who have fearlessly claimed political,
religious and social equality for women for the last twenty
years, should now, with bated breath, give her but a passing word
in their public speeches and editorial comments--as if her rights
constituted but a side issue of this grave question of
reconstruction? All must see that this claim for _male_ suffrage
is but another experiment in class legislation, another violation
of the republican idea. With the black man we have no new element
in government, but with the education and elevation of women we
have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and
nobler life, and thus, by the law of attraction, to lift all
races to a more even platform than can ever be reached in the
political isolation of the sexes. Why ignore 15,000,000 women in
the reconstruction? The philosophy of this silence is plain
enough. The black man crowned with the rights of citizenship,
there are no political Ishmaelites left but the women. This is
the last stronghold of aristocracy in the country. Sydney Smith
says: "There always has been, and always will be, a class of men
in the world so small that, if women were educated, there would
be nothing left below them."

It is a consolation to the "white male," to the popinjays in all
our seminaries of learning, to the ignorant foreigner, the
boot-black and barber, the idiot--for a "white male" may vote if
he be not more than nine-tenths a fool--to look down on women of
wealth and education, who write books, make speeches, and discuss
principles with the savans of their age. It is a consolation for
these classes to be able to say, "w