Boston would spend ten thousand
dollars in one year in a city frolic, or spend two or three
thousand every year, on the Fourth of July, for sky-rockets and
firecrackers; would spend four or five thousand dollars to get
their Canadian guests drunk in Boston harbor, and then pretend
that Boston had not money enough to establish a high-school for
girls, to teach the daughters of mechanics and grocers to read
French and Latin, and to understand the higher things which rich
men's sons are driven to at college? I do not.

Do you believe that the women of Boston, in 1851, would have
spent three or four thousand dollars to kidnap a poor man, and
have taken all the chains which belonged to the city and put them
round the court-house, and have drilled three hundred men, armed
with bludgeons and cutlasses, to steal a man and carry him back
to slavery? I do not. Do you think, if the women had had the
control, "fifteen hundred men of property and standing" would
have volunteered to take a poor man, kidnapped in Boston, and
conduct him out of the State, with fire and sword? I believe no
such thing.

Do you think the women of Boston would take the poorest and most
unfortunate children in the town, put them all together into one
school, making that the most miserable in the city, where they
had not and could not have half the advantages of the other
children in different schools, and all that because the
unfortunates were dark-colored? Do you think the women of Boston
would shut a bright boy out of the High-School or Latin-School,
because he was black in the face?

Women are said to be cowardly. When Thomas Sims, out of his
dungeon, sent to the churches his petition for their prayers, had
women been "the Christian clergy," do you believe they would not
have dared to pray?

If women had a voice in the affairs of Massachusetts, do you
think they would ever have made laws so that a lazy husband could
devour all the substance of his active wife--spite of her wish;
so that a drunken husband could command her bodily presence in
his loathly house; and when an infamous man was divorced from his
wife, that he could keep all the children? I confess I do not.

If the affairs of the nation had been under woman's joint
control, I doubt that we should have