l rights and responsibilities, to mark out the
limits, to vindicate the advantages, and to analyze the bases on
which these rest, as we have just had it done. If participation
in civil rights is based on mind--as in this country we claim it
to be--then certainly to-night we have no right to deny that the
cause is gained, for the friend who has preceded me has left very
little for any one to say; she has covered the whole ground.

In fact this question is a question of civilization, nothing
less. The position of woman anywhere is the test of civilization.
You need not ask for the statistics of education, of national
wealth, or of crime; tell me the position of woman, and you
answer the question of the nation's progress. Utah is barbarism;
we need no evidence; we read it in the single custom that lowers
the female sex. Wherever you go in history this is true. Step by
step as woman ascends, civilization ripens. I warn the anxious
and terrified that their first efforts should be to conquer their
fears, for the triumph of this crusade is written as certain on
the next leaf that turns in the great history of the race, as
that the twentieth century will open.

The time was when a Greek dared not let his wife go out of doors,
and in the old comic play of Athens, one of the characters says,
"Where is your wife?" "She has gone out." "Death and furies! what
does she do out?" Doubtless, if any "fanatic" had claimed the
right of woman to walk out of doors, he would have been deemed
crazy in Athens; had he claimed the right of a modest married
woman to be seen out of doors it would have been considered
fanaticism, and I do not know but that the _Herald_ of that day
would have branded him as an infidel. But spite of the anchored
conservatism of others, women got out of doors and the country
grew, and the world turned round, and so modern Europe has
progressed. Now the pendulum swung one way, and now another, but
woman has gained right after right until with us, to the
astonishment of the Greek, could he see it--of the Turk, when he
hears it--she stands almost side by side with man in her civil
rights. The Saxon race has led the van. I trample underfoot
contemptuously the Jewish--yes, the Jewish--ridicule which laughs
at such a Convention as this; for we are