Never in the history of this or any other genuine
republic has the law-making power, whether in general elections or
in the framing of laws in legislative assemblies, been vested in
individuals who have exercised it by reason of their physical
powers. On the contrary, the physically weak have never for that
reason been deprived of the suffrage nor of the privilege of
service in the public councils so long as they possessed the
necessary powers of locomotion and expression, of conscience and
intelligence, which are common to all. The aged and the physically
weak have, as a rule, by reason of superior wisdom and moral
sense, far more than made good any bodily inferiority by which
they have differed from the more robust members of the community
in the discussion and decisions of the ballot-box and in councils
of the state.

The executive power of itself is a mere physical
instrumentality--an animal quality--and it is confided from
necessity to those individuals who possess that quality, but
always with danger, except so far as wisdom and virtue control its
exercise. And it is obvious that the greater the mass of higher
and spiritual forces, whether found in those to whom the execution
of the law is assigned or in the great mass by whom the suffrage
is exercised, and who direct the execution of the law, the greater
will be the safety and the surer will be the happiness of the
state.

It is too late to question the intellectual and moral capacity
of woman to understand great political issues (which are always
primarily questions of conscience--questions of the intelligent
application of the principles of right and of wrong in public and
private affairs) and properly decide them at the polls. Indeed,
so far as your committee are aware, the pretense is no longer
advanced that woman should not vote by reason of her mental or
moral unfitness to perform this legislative function; but the
suffrage is denied to her because she can not hang criminals,
suppress mobs, nor handle the enginery of war. We have already
seen the untenable nature of this assumption, because those who
make it bestow the suffrage upon very large classes of men who,
however well qualified they may be to vote, are physically unable
to perform any of the duties which appertain to the execution of
the law and t