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various places about the capitol yesterday morning. At 11 o'clock
the doors were opened and the committee-room at once filled.[34]
Mrs. Hooker, with the fervor and eloquence of her family,
reviewed all the popular arguments against woman suffrage. She
said she once believed that twenty years was little time enough
for a foreigner to live in this country before he could cast a
ballot. She understands the spirit of our institutions better
now. If disfranchisement meant annihilation, there might be
safety in disfranchising the poor, the ignorant, the vicious. But
it does not. It means danger to everything we hold dear.

The corner-stone of this republic is God's own doctrine of
liberty and responsibility. Liberty is the steam, responsibility
the brakes, and election-day, the safety-valve. The foreigner
comes to this country expecting to find it a paradise. He finds,
indeed, a ladder reaching to the skies, but resting upon the
earth, and he is at the bottom round. But on one day in the year
he is as good as the richest man in the land. He can make the
banker stand in the line behind him until he votes, and if he has
wrongs he learns how to right them. If he has mistaken ideas of
liberty, he is instructed what freedom means.

Wire-pulling politicians may well fear to have women
enfranchised. There are too many of them, and they have had too
much experience in looking after the details of their households
to be easily duped by the tricks of politicians. You can't keep
women away from primary meetings as you do intelligent men. Women
know that every corner in the house must be inspected if the
house is to be clean. Fathers and brothers want women to vote so
that they can have a decent place for a primary meeting, a decent
place to vote in and a decent man to vote for.

The Indian question would have been peacefully and righteously
settled long ago without any standing army, if Lucretia Mott
could have led in the councils of the nation, and the millions
spent in fighting the Indians might have been used in
kindergartens for the poor, to some lasting benefit. Down with
the army, down with appropriation bills to repair the
consequences of wrong-doing, when women vote. Millions more of
women would ask for this if it were not for the cruelty and