his
amendment be incorporated in this bill I shall vote for it with
all my heart and soul. I beg to be understood that I would not
inaugurate the movement, I would not make the change by my own
mere motion, because I would not venture upon the change
anywhere. That change must rise out of, spring out of, and come
up from society generally. It is that thing which the poet has
called the _vox populi_, and which he likens to the _vox Dei_.
When the community spontaneously demands this call, when the
community spontaneously demands this action, I yield to it. It is
so in this instance. While I yield to the demand for negro
suffrage, I demand at the same time female suffrage; and when I
yield to the question of manhood suffrage, I feel assured I throw
along the antidote to all the poison which I suppose would
accompany the first proposition.

I am not afraid of negro suffrage if you allow female suffrage to
go hand in hand with it. I believe that if there is any one
influence in the country which will break down this tribal
antipathy, which will make the two races one in political harmony
and political action, not in actuality as races by amalgamation,
but which will induce that harmony and that co-operation which
may bring about the highest state, perhaps, of social
civilization and development, it is the fact that woman and not
man must interfere in order to smooth the pathway for these two
races to go along harmoniously together. And it is for that
reason that I insist that when you do make this step, this step
forward which once made can never be retrieved, you must do that
other thing which assures its success after it is made. Let the
negro male vote now, and you open the arena of strife and
contention; let both sexes vote, and then you close that arena of
strife, you bring in that element which subdues all strife, which
has made America what she is, which has made the American
political meeting, which has made the American political
convention, not the scene of strife or angry contention, where
armed men met together to settle political differences, as in the
Polish Diet, but a convention where all were subjected to reason,
influenced, as it might properly be, by eloquence and by that
"feast of reason" which is "the flow of the soul" t