ivilization? It was the
women of Great Britain that first said her statute-book disgraced
her. Who could say, that if those women had been voters, they
might not have reformed it?

Douglas Jerrold said: "Woman knows she is omnipotent"; and so she
is. She may be ignorant, she may not have a dollar, she may have
no right given her to testify in the court of justice; she may be
a slave, chained by a dozen statutes; but, when her husband loves
her, she is his queen and mistress, in spite of them all; and the
world knows it. All history bears testimony to this omnipotent
influence. What we are here for is to clear up the choked
channel; make hidden power confess itself, and feel its
responsibility, feel how much rests upon it, and therefore gird
itself to its duty. We are to say to the women: "Yours is
one-half of the human race. Come to the ballot-box, and feel,
when you cast a vote in regard to some great moral question, the
dread post you fill, and fit yourself for it." Woman at home
controls her son, guides her husband--in reality, makes him
vote--but acknowledges no responsibility, and receives no
education for such a throne. By her caprices in private life, she
often ruins the manhood of her husband, and checks the
enthusiastic purposes of her son.

Many a young girl, in her married life, loses her husband, and
thus is left a widow with two or three children. Now, who is to
educate them and control them? We see, if left to her own
resources, the intellect which she possesses, and which has
remained in a comparatively dormant state, displayed in its full
power. What a depth of heart lay hidden in that woman! She takes
her husband's business--guides it as though it were a trifle; she
takes her sons, and leads them; sets her daughters an example;
like a master-leader, she governs the whole household. That is
woman's influence. What made that woman? Responsibility. Call her
out from weakness, lay upon her soul the burden of her children's
education, and she is no longer a girl, but a woman!

Horace Greeley once said to Margaret Fuller: "If you should ask a
woman to carry a ship round Cape Horn, how would she go to work
to do it? Let her do this, and I will give up the question." In
the fall of 1856, a Boston girl, only twenty years of age