urd to deny woman
her religious rights. Then why should she not be allowed to
choose her party?

We claim the precedents in this matter. It was arranged and
agreed upon, in the reform of Europe, that women should have the
right to choose their religious creeds. I say, therefore, this is
not a new cause; it is an old one. It is as old as the American
idea. We are individuals by virtue of our brains, not by virtue
of our muscles. "Why do you women meddle in politics?" asked
Napoleon of De Stael. "Sire, so long as you will hang us, we must
ask the reason," was the answer. The whole political philosophy
of the subject is in that. The instant you say, "Woman is not
competent to go to the ballot-box," I reply: "She is not
competent to go to the gallows or the State prison. If she is
competent to go to the State prison, then she is competent to go
to the ballot-box, and tell how thieves should be punished."
[Applause].

Man is a man because he thinks. Woman has already begun to think.
She has touched literature with the wand of her enchantment, and
it rises to her level, until woman becomes an author as well as
reader. And what is the result? We do not have to expurgate the
literature of the nineteenth century before placing it in the
hands of youth. Those who write for the lower level sink down to
dwell with their kind.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Clarke expatiated on the wholesome influence
of the side-by-side progress of the sexes. There are no women
more deserving of your honest approbation than those who dare to
work singly for the elevation of their sex....

Woman's Rights and Negro Rights! What rights have either women or
negroes that we have any reason to respect? The world says:
"None!"

There has lately been a petition carried into the British
Parliament, asking--for what? It asks that the laws of marriage
and divorce shall be brought into conformity with the creed and
civilization of Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth
century. The state of British law, on the bill of divorce, was a
disgrace to the British statute-book. Whose was the intellect and
whose the heart to point out, and who had the courage to look in
the face of British wealth and conservatism, and claim that the
law of divorce was a disgrace to modern c