g than to have a pot-house politician introduce
himself into a gentleman's family, with his wife seated at one
side of the fireplace and himself at the other, and this man
coming between to urge arguments why the wife should oppose the
policy that the husband advocates, or that the husband should
oppose the policy that the wife advocates?

If this measure means anything it is a proposition that the
Senate of the United States shall first vote to carry into effect
this unjust and improper intrusion into the home circle. Suppose
this resolution to raise a select committee should be passed:
that committee will have its hands full and its ears full of
petitions and applications and speeches from strong-minded women,
and of course it must make some report to the Senate; and we
shall have this subject introduced in here as one that requires a
peculiar application of the powers of the Senate for its
digestion and for the completion of the bills and measures
founded upon it. At the next session of congress this select
committee will become a standing committee of the Senate, and
then we shall have that which appears to be the most potential
and at the same time the most dangerous element in politics
to-day, agitation, agitation, agitation. It seems that the
legislators of the United States Government are not to be allowed
to pass in quiet judgment upon measures of this character, but
like many other things which are addressing themselves to the
attention of the people on this side of the water and the other,
they must all be moved against the Senate and against the House
by agitation. You raise your committee and allow the agitators to
come before them, yea, more than that, you invite them to come;
and what is the result? The Congress of the United States will
for the next ten or perhaps twenty years be continually assailed
for special and peculiar legislation in favor of the women of the
land.

I do not understand that a woman in this country has any more
right to a select committee than a man has. It would be just as
rational and as proper in every legislative and parliamentary
sense to have a select committee for the consideration of the
rights of men as to have a committee for the consideration of the
rights of women. I object, sir, to this