human intelligence
and goodness. _No sacrifice of right, no conservation of wrong_,
should be the rally-call of mothers whose sons must vindicate the one
and expiate the other in blood! Negro slavery is but one of the
protean forms of disfranchised humanity. Class legislation is the one
great fountain of national and domestic antagonisms. Every ignoring of
inherent rights, every transfer of inherent interest, from the first
organization of communities, has been the license of power to robbery
and murder, itself the embodiment of a thievish and murderous
selfishness.

That the disenfranchisement of the women of '76 destroyed the moral
guarantee of a pure republic, or that their enfranchisement would
early have broken the chains of the slave, I may not now discuss. Yet
it may be well to note that ever since freedom and slavery joined
issue in this Government, the women of the free States have been a
conceded majority, almost a unit, against slavery, as if verifying the
declaration of God in the garden, "I will put enmity between thee
(Satan) and the woman." Every legal invasion of rights, forming a
precedent and source of infinite series of resultant wrongs, makes it
the duty of woman to persist in demanding the right, that she may
abate the wrong--and first her own enfranchisement. The national life
is in peril, and woman is constitutionally disabled from rushing to
her country's rescue. Robbery and arson invade her home; and though
man is powerless to protect, she may not save it by appeals to the
ballot-box.

A hundred thousand loyal voters of Illinois are grappling with the
traitors of the South. If the hundred thousand loyal women left in
their homes had been armed with ballots, copperhead treason would not
have wrested the influence of that State to the aid and comfort of
the rebellion. If the women of Iowa had been legally empowered to meet
treason at home, the wasteful expense of canvassing distant
battle-fields for the soldiers' votes might have been saved. And it
would have been easier for these women to vote than to pay their
proportion of the tax incurred. Yankee thrift and shrewdness would
have been vindicated if Connecticut had provided for the
enfranchisement of her women by constitutional amendment, instead of
wasting her money and butting her dignity against judicial vetoes in
legislating for the absent soldiers' vote.

This war is adding a vast army of widows and orphans to this already
large class