a concession! Mr.
President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On
the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that
doctrine; whenever you crystallize that idea in the public
mind of this country, you ring the death-knell of American
liberties!!

The demand we to-day make, is not the idiosyncrasy of a few
discontented minds, but a universal movement. Woman is everywhere
throwing off the lethargy of ages, and is already close upon you
in the whole realm of thought--in art, science, literature and
government. Everything heralds the dawn of the new era when moral
power is to govern nations. In asking you, Honorable Gentlemen,
to extend suffrage to woman, we do not press on you the risk and
responsibility of a new step, but simply to try a measure that
has already proved wise and safe the world over. So long as
political power was absolute and hereditary, woman shared it with
man by birth. In Hungary and some provinces of France and
Germany, women holding this inherited right confer their right of
franchise on their husbands. In 1858, in the old town of Upsal,
the authorities granted the right of suffrage to fifty women
holding real estate, and to thirty-one doing business in their
own name. The representative their votes elected was to sit in
the House of Burgesses. In Ireland, the Court of Queen's Bench,
Dublin, restored to women, in 1864, the old right of voting for
town commissioners. In 1864, too, the government of Moravia
decided that all women who are tax-payers had the right to vote.
In Canada, in 1850, an electoral privilege was conferred on
women, in the hope that the Protestant might balance the Roman
Catholic power in the school system. "I lived," says a friend of
mine, "where I saw this right exercised for four years by female
property holders, and never heard the most cultivated man, even
Lord Elgin, object to its results." Women vote in Austria,
Australia, Holland and Sweden, on property qualifications. There
is a bill now before the British Parliament, presented by John
Stuart Mill, asking for household suffrage, accompanied by a
petition from eleven thousand of the best educated women in
England.

Would you be willing to admit, gentlemen, that women know less,
have less vir