inciples of
law and justice? It is the essence of cruelty and tyranny to take her
hard earnings without her consent, blocked as her way is to wealth and
independence, to make sidewalks, highways, and bridges; to build
jails, prisons, and alms-houses, the legitimate outgrowth of the
whisky traffic, which she abhors. On what principle of republican
government is one class of tax-payers thus defrauded of one of the
most sacred rights of citizenship? What logical argument can be made
to prove "the unreasonableness of this demand," for one class above
all others? Principles of justice, to have any value or significance,
must be universal in their application to all humanity.

4th. As to the point made by "Eumenes," "that women are not fit
persons to take part in government," "that they do not even pretend to
any judgment on the subject," we have simply to say that the writer's
prejudices contradict all the facts of our common experience. Women
are so pre-eminently fitted for government, that the one fear in all
ages among men has been lest by some chance they should be governed by
women; and the smaller the man the greater the fear.

Blackstone says "the elements of sovereignty are three: 'Wisdom,
Goodness, and Power.'" Admitting for the sake of argument that "Power"
in this connection means physical force, the distinctive point of male
superiority, and not moral power, which may be equal in both sexes,
all must concede the remaining necessary elements to woman as well as
man. Who so bold, or blind, as to deny wisdom and goodness, the chief
elements of beneficent government, to woman, with the long record of
illustrious and saintly characters gilding every page of history
before him?

Whatever doubts the women known to the author of "Eumenes" might have
had as to their own capacities; the women of to-day do assume to know
that they are more capable of self-government than men are, and that
they understand the principles that underlie a republic far better
than the vast majority of foreigners now crowding our shores, the
Right Honorable James Charles Fox to the contrary notwithstanding.
Yea, without danger of contradiction, we may say there are women in
this nation even now, who understand the political issues of this hour
quite as well as those who stand at the head of our government.

We are very apt to accept popular assertions ofttimes repeated as
truisms, and in this way man's superiority has passed into a proverb,