re not let her
vote. Our little State has been two hundred years under male
legislation, and yet a long memorial from hundreds of clergymen
and other Christian men went up to our legislature two years ago,
representing our legislation on divorce as demoralizing and as
fatal to the best interests of the marriage relation. It really
seems as if the incompetency for the management of public affairs
which by mere assumption is charged in advance upon women, has
been proved with regard to men by an actual experience of many
years. The true idea is for man and woman to share together the
responsibilities and duties of legislation, and until this is
done I have no hope for any real progress towards purity in the
administration of our public affairs. We who favor woman suffrage
speak confidently on this subject because the reform works so
well wherever it has been tried, in England, Sweden, Austria and
Wyoming Territory.

No rational man can suppose for a moment that with woman suffrage
established in England and on the continent of Europe, we in this
country, which so specially stands on equal representation, are
going to refuse it. It must be set down as one of the certain
things of the future. And when it has come, and women vote, it
will excite no more attention or comment than the voting of our
colored people.

Now if woman suffrage is to come, is it worth while to be making
the impression that the women of our country are not to be
trusted with it, and that the marriage relation is to be
imperiled by it? Above all, is it manly or just to be charging
corrupt motives on nine-tenths of those who advocate the reform?
The notoriety which to some extent its advocates must get is
almost universally painful to the women who are the subjects of
it. One noble woman, whose whole soul is in this cause, and the
purity of whose motives in this, as in everything else, I have
had good opportunity to learn, said to me, on reading Dr.
Bushnell's remark in his book on woman suffrage, that these women
were only trying to make themselves men: "Cruel, cruel words! If
so noble a man as Dr. Bushnell so utterly fails to comprehend a
woman's nature, shall not she be allowed to speak for herself,
and no testimony be taken but hers?"[166]

Much might be said in re