she will be able to
reclaim some of those privileges that are now monopolized by
the sterner sex.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, etc.,

R. K. SCOTT, _Governor_.

OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL, Columbia, Feb. 1, 1871.

I hoped when I received your invitation to the meeting
to-night of the friends of woman suffrage, that I should be
able to attend in person, but at a late hour I find other
duties standing in the way, and I can only say a word of
approval and encouragement with my pen. The woman suffrage
cause is to my mind so just and so expedient as to need
little argument. To say that my mother, my sisters or my
wife have less interest in good government than I have, or
are less fitted by nature to understand and use the ballot
than I am, is to contradict reason and fact.

Upon the same grounds that I defend my own right to share in
the government which controls and protects me, do I now
assert the right of woman to a voice in public affairs. For
the same reasons that I would regard an attempt to rob me of
my civil rights as tyranny, do I now protest against the
continued civil inequality and thralldom of woman. I take no
merit or pride to myself for such a position. I have felt
and said these things during my whole life. They are to me
self-evident truths; needing no more demonstration by
argument than the first lines of the Declaration of American
Independence. My claim for woman is simply this: Give her a
full and fair chance to act in any sphere for which she can
fit herself. Her sphere is as wide as man's. It has no
limits except her capacity. If woman cannot perform a
soldier's duty, then the army is not her sphere; if she can,
it is her sphere, as much as it is man's.

I value the ballot for woman chiefly because it opens to her
a wide, free avenue to a complete development of all her
powers. The Chinese lady's shoe is nothing compared to the
clamps and fetters which we Americans have put upon woman's
mind and soul. An impartial observer would scarcely condemn
the one and approve the other.