except when they vote for delegates? Are
you going to presume that when the Church has a multitude of members,
that it is going to sit here and change, by an interpretation, a
Restrictive Rule, or put in what was never in, and never understood to
be in? The Restrictive Rule fills up the ministerial delegates. Every
time you put a woman in, you put a man out. This subject has never come
up here before. The question is this, Do those Restrictive Rules mean
anything? If they do, you cannot put in anything that the fathers did
not put in. And if you put in women as lawmakers; if you can read those
Rules and put them in there, you can change any one of the Restrictive
Rules by a majority of one. And I want to say to you, that if you do
it, you will prove to the Methodist Episcopal Church that the sole
protection we have against the caprice of a majority of the General
Conference is not worth the paper it is written on. All you have to do
is to get a majority of the Conference against the Episcopacy, and then
put any interpretation, and then you get a few women admitted, and this
you call the progress of the age. Mr. Chairman, I believe in progress,
and when the Church progresses far enough, it can change this law in
a constitutional way. But it has not yet gone far enough. These men
believe that the Church has never done it, or that it is best. Dr. Flood
said that they must be brought in in the light of progress. I affirm
that Dr. Flood's arguments all point in that direction--they must be
interpreted in the light of progress. When you do that you have got a
despotism. I want to go back to my constituents and say this: I exercise
all the power that our Charter gives me. But at the moment that anything
is proposed, and we put in what the fathers did not have before their
eyes, at that moment I stop and say, Thus far, but no farther. A
despotism is a despotism, whether it is a despotism without restraint,
the Czar with his wife, the Czar without his wife. You will turn this
house into a despotism, and you will find it difficult to defend
Methodism by its peculiar Constitution before the American people.

If you want women in, there is another way to bring them in. Send the
question around as you did for lay delegation. There was only a doubt in
the General Conference of 1868, and yet they had a sense of candor. John
M'Clintock fought in favor of taking them in. But he said, "I think it
best to send the question around." True pr