he would like to
vote. [Applause]. I never found a slave in my life, who, removed
from the eye of the people about him, would not tell me he wanted
liberty--never one. I have been in the slave States for years. I
have been in the slave-pens, and upon the plantations, and have
stood beside the slave as he worked in the sugar cane and the
cotton-field; and I never found one who dared in the presence of
white men to say he wanted freedom. When women and young girls
are asked if they want to vote, they are almost always in just
that situation where they are afraid to speak what they think;
and no wonder they so often say they do not want to vote.

EVENING SESSION.

The meeting was called to order by the President, Mrs. Mott, who
introduced as the first speaker Col. Charles E. Moss, of Missouri.

Mr. MOSS said: This is a subject upon which I have thought for a
number of years; and I have become fully convinced that no reason
can be assigned for extending the right of suffrage to any of the
male sex, that does not equally apply to the female.

When our fathers formed the national Constitution, they made it
their duty to secure to every State a republican form of
government. No government can be republican in form, unless it is
so in substance and in fact; based upon the consent of the
governed. After the troublesome war we have just passed through,
we are called upon not only to reconstruct the ten unrepresented
States of the nation, but to purify the republicanism of our
government in the Northern States and make it more consistent
with our professions. It is a fit time, then, to take up the
subject of suffrage, and to base it upon a well-established
principle. Some say that the right of suffrage is a privilege, to
be given or withheld at pleasure. That does not seem to me a very
safe foundation for so important a right. It is either a
privilege or a natural right. If we recognize it as a natural
right we have a peaceable, safe, legal mode of resistance against
the disfranchisement of the people. If we admit it to be a
privilege to be granted or withheld, no man and no woman has any
legal right to interpose any objection to his own
disfranchisement. But I see that our friend has come in who was
expected first to address you, and I will not take up more