heads plotting against the people.
They are the vanguard, the sappers and miners of returning
despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us."

"All honor to Jefferson.'--the man who, in the concrete pressure of
a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the
coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document _an abstract truth applicable to all men and
all times_, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming
days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of
reappearing tyranny and oppression."

The special "abstract truth" to which President Lincoln thus attaches a
value so great, and which he pronounces "applicable to all men and all
times," is evidently the assertion of the Declaration that governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, following the
assertion that all men are born free and equal; that is, as some one has
well interpreted it, equally men. I do not see how any person but a dreamy
recluse can deny that the strength of our republic rests on these
principles; which are so thoroughly embedded in the average American mind
that they take in it, to some extent, the place occupied in the average
English mind by the emotion of personal loyalty to a certain reigning
family. But it is impossible to defend these principles logically, as
Senator Hoar has well pointed out, without recognizing that they are as
applicable to women as to men. If this is the case, the claim of women
rests on a right,--indeed, upon the same right which is the foundation of
all our institutions.

The encouraging fact in the present condition of the whole matter is not
that we get more votes here or there for this or that form of woman
suffrage--for experience has shown that there are great ups and downs in
that respect; and States that at one time seemed nearest to woman suffrage,
as Maine and Kansas, now seem quite apathetic. But the real encouragement
is that the logical ground is more and more conceded; and the point now
usually made is not that the Jeffersonian maxim excludes women, but that
"the consent of the governed" is substantially given by the general consent
of women. That this argument has a certain plausibility may be conceded;
but it is equally clear that the minority of women, those who do wish to
vote, includes on the whole the natural leaders,--those who are foremost in