mpelled to
give that reason, I said then, and I say now, "If I have no
reason to offer why a negro man shall not vote, I have no reason
to offer why a white woman shall not vote." If the negro man is
interested in the Government of the country, if he can not trust
to the masses of the people that the Government shall be a fair
and just Government and that it shall do right to him, then the
woman is also interested that this Government shall be fair to
woman and fair to the interests of woman. Why not, Mr. President?
Are not these interests equal to those of the negro and of his
race? I know it has been said that the woman is represented by
her husband, represented by the male; and yet we know how she has
been represented by her husband in bygone times; we know how she
is represented by her barbarian husband; and let him who wants to
know how she is represented by her civilized husband go to her
speeches made in the recent Woman's Rights Convention. We know
how she has been represented by her barbarian husband in the past
and is even at the present. She bears his burdens, she bears his
children, she nurses them, she does his work, she chops his wood,
and she grinds his corn; while he, forsooth, by virtue of this
patent of nobility that he has derived, in consequence of his
masculinity, from Heaven, confines himself to the manly
occupations of hunting and fishing and war.

I should like to hear my honorable friend from Maine [Mr.
Morrill], so apt, so pertinent, so eloquent on all questions,
discourse upon the title which the male derives in consequence of
the fact that he has been a fisher and a hunter and a warrior all
the time; and then I should like to know how he would
discriminate between that fisher and hunter and warrior, and
those Amazons who burnt their right breasts in order that they
might the more readily draw the bow and against whose onset no
troops of that day were able to stand. I should also like to know
from him how it was that the female veterans of the army of
Dahomey recently, within the last three or four years, in the
face of an escarpment that would have made European veterans,
aye, and I might say American veterans tremble, scrambled over
that escarpment and carried the city sword in hand.

Now, Mr. President, it