raised the money. Thirty years have shown, with whatever
temporary variations, one vast wave of progress toward success, both in
this country and in Europe. Now success is statesmanship.

I remember well the shouts of laughter that used to greet the anti-slavery
orators when they claimed that the real statesmen of the country were not
the Clays and Calhouns, who spent their strength in trying to sustain
slavery, and failed, but the Garrisons, who devoted their lives to its
overthrow, and were succeeding. Yet who now doubts this? Tried by the same
standard, the statesmanship of to-day does not lie in the men who can find
no larger questions before them than those which concern the fisheries, but
in the women whose far-reaching efforts will one day make every existing
voting-list so much waste paper.

Of course, when the voting-lists with the women's names are ready to be
printed, it will be interesting to speculate as to how these new monarchs
of our destiny will use their power. For myself, a long course of
observation in the anti-slavery and woman-suffrage movements has satisfied
me that women are not idiots, and that, on the whole, when they give their
minds to a question, whether moral or practical, they understand it quite
as readily as men. In the anti-slavery movement it is certain that a woman,
Elizabeth Heyrick, gave the first impulse to its direct and simple solution
in England; and that another woman, Mrs. Stowe, did more than any man,
except perhaps Garrison and John Brown, to secure its right solution here.
There was never a moment, I am confident, when any great political question
growing out of the anti-slavery struggle might not have been put to vote
more safely among the women of New England than among the clergy, or the
lawyers, or the college professors. If they did so well in that great
issue, it is fair to assume that, after they have a sufficient inducement
to study out future issues, they at least will not be very much behind the
men.

But we cannot keep it too clearly in view, that the whole question, whether
women would vote better or worse than men on general questions, is a minor
matter. It was equally a minor matter in case of the negroes. We gave the
negroes the ballot, simply because they needed it for their own protection;
and we shall by and by give it to women for the same reason. Tried by that
test, we shall find that their statesmanship will be genuine. When they
come into power, drunk