of
the State. Just imagine the motley crew from the ten thousand
dens of poverty and vice in our large cities, limping, raving,
cringing, staggering up to the polls, while the loyal mothers of
a million soldiers whose bones lay bleaching on every Southern
plain, stand outside sad and silent witnesses of this wholesale
desecration of republican institutions. When you say it would
degrade woman to go to the polls, do you not make a sad
confession of your irreligious mode of observing that most sacred
right of citizenship? The ballot-box, in a republican government,
should be guarded with as much love and care as was the Ark of
the Lord among the Children of Israel. Here, where we have no
heaven-anointed kings or priests, law must be to us a holy thing;
and the ballot-box the holy of holies; for on it depends the
safety and stability of our institutions. I, for one, gentlemen,
am not willing to be thus represented. I claim to understand the
interests of the nation better than yonder pauper in your
alms-house, than the unbalanced graduate from your asylum and
prison, or the popinjay of twenty-one from your seminary of
learning, or the traveler on the tow-path of the Erie canal. No
wonder that with such voters as Art. 2, Sec. 3 welcomes to the
polls, we have these contradictory laws and constitutions. No
wonder that with such voters, sex and color should be exalted
above loyalty, virtue, wealth and education. I warn you,
legislators of the State of New York, that you need the moral
power of wise and thoughtful women in your political councils, to
outweigh the incoming tide of poverty, ignorance, and vice that
threatens our very existence as a nation. Have not the women of
the republic an equal interest with yourselves in the government,
in free institutions, in progressive ideas, and in the success of
the most liberal political measures? Remember, in your last
election, the republican majority in this State was only fourteen
thousand, all told. If you would not see the liberal party
swamped in the next Presidential campaign, treble your majority
by enfranchising those classes who would support it in all just
and merciful legislation....

The extension of suffrage is the political idea of our day,
agitating alike the leading minds of both con