the street, to drag down
this city into the pit that it deserves. (Loud applause).

Now, what is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat, and
gibbet him in _The New York Tribune_? Not at all; it does the
women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what
is to be done. Behind the door at which those women stand asking
for work, on one side stands an orthodox disciple of St. Paul,
and on the other a dainty exquisite; and the one says, it is not
religious, and the other says, it is not fashionable, for woman
to be anything but a drudge. Now, strangle the one in his own
creed, and smother the other in his own perfumes, and give to
those thousand women freedom to toil. Let public opinion only
grant that, like their thousand brothers, those thousand women
may go out, and wherever they find work to do, do it, without a
stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have
the same liberty to use the pen, to practice law, to write
books, to attend the telegraph, to go into the artist's studio,
to serve in a library, to tend in a gallery of art, to do
anything that her brother can do. St. Paul is dead and rotten,
and ought to be forgotten--(Applause, laughter, and a few
hisses)--so far as this doctrine goes, mark you! for his is the
noblest figure in all history, except that of Christ, the
broadest and most masterly intellect of any age; but he was a Jew
and not a Christian; he lived under Jewish civilization and not
ours, and was speaking by his own light, and not by inspiration
of God.

This is all we claim; and we claim the ballot for this reason;
the moment you give woman power, that moment men will see to it
that she has the way cleared for her. There are two sources of
power: one is civil, the ballot; the other is physical, the
rifle. I do not believe that the upper classes--education,
wealth, aristocracy, conservatism--the men that are in--ever
yielded, except to fear. I think the history of the race shows
that the upper classes never granted a privilege to the lower out
of love. As Jeremy Bentham says, "The upper classes never yielded
a privilege without being bullied out of it." When man rises in
revolution, with the sword in his right hand, trembling wealth
and conservatism say, "What do you want? Take it