members of a church that the women members have a right to change
their creed. All that is settled; nobody contests it. If a man
stood up here and said, "I am a Calvinist, and therefore my wife
is bound to be one," you would send him to a lunatic asylum. You
would say, "Poor man! don't judge him by what he says; he don't
mean it." But law is halting back just where that old
civilization was; we want to change it.

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanaticism about it.
We are merely extending the area of liberty--nothing else. We
have made great progress. The law passed at the last session of
the New York Legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The
moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You can
not stop with an inconsistent statute-book. A man is uneasy who
is inconsistent. As Thomas Fuller says, "You can not make one
side of the face laugh, and the other cry!" You can not have
one-half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian;
one-half of the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have
granted that woman may be hung, therefore you must grant that
woman may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed,
therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she
ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation--and this
is, in fact, all that we claim--the whole of it.

Now, I want to consider some of the objections that are made to
this claim. Men say, "Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know
enough; she has not sense enough to vote." I take this idea of
the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim, for this reason,
because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under
republican institutions. The rule of despotism is that one class
is made to protect the other; that the rich, the noble, the
educated are a sort of probate court, to take care of the poor,
the ignorant, and the common classes. Our fathers got rid of all
that. They knocked it on the head by the simple principle, that
no class is safe, unless government is so arranged that each
class has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That
is the idea of republics. The Briton says to the poor man, "Be
content; I am worth five millions, and I will protect you." And
America says, "Thank you, sir; I had rather take care