e of my
rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, or from
late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I
ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field
of wheat, or a pasture for kine? If I choose I may counsel with
you. If experience has given you wisdom, even of this world, in
managing your property and mine, I should be wise to learn from
you. But injustice is not wont to yield wisdom; grapes do not
grow of thorns, nor figs of thistles.

Born of the unjust and cruel subjection of woman to man, we have
in these United States a harvest of 116,000 paupers, 36,000
criminals, and such a mighty host of blind, deaf and dumb,
idiotic, insane, feeble-minded, and children with tendencies to
crime, as almost to lead one to hope for the extinction of the
human race rather than for its perpetuation after its own kind.
The wisdom of man licenses the dram-shop, and then rears
station-houses, jails, and gibbets to provide for the victims. In
this District we have 135 teachers of public schools and 238
police officers, and the last report shows that public safety
demands a police force of 900. We have 31,671 children of school
age; 31,671 reasons why I want to vote. We have here 7,000 more
children of school age than there are seats in all the public
schools, and from the swarm of poor, ignorant, and vagrant
children, the lists of criminals and paupers are constantly
supplied. To provide for these evils there is an annual
expenditure of $350,000, not including expenses of courts, while
for education the annual expenditure is $280,000.

Will you say that the wives and the mothers, the house and
homekeepers of this small territory, have no interest in all
these things? If dram-shops are licensed and brothels protected,
are not our sons, our brothers, tempted and ruined, our daughters
lured from their homes, and lost to earth and heaven? Long and
patiently women have borne wrongs too deep to be put into words;
wrongs for which men have provided no redress and have found no
remedy. When five years ago, with our social atmosphere poisoned
with vices which as women we had no power to remove, men in
authority began a series of attempts to fasten upon us by law the
huge typical vice of all the ages--the socia