sneerer or opposer to open his or her lips. Who now will dare
call us 'infidels,' since Bishop Simpson, Henry Ward Beecher, and
Dr. Tyng champion our cause, and proclaim it 'woman's _duty_ to
vote for the good of humanity'? Who will now dare sneer while the
leading minds of Europe--among them Ruskin, John Stuart Mill,
Mazzini, Victor Hugo--must share the odium with those hitherto
called 'strong-minded?'

"It was with pain that I heard Wendell Phillips say on our
platform, 'Albany can not help you; your throne is the world of
fashion!'--meaning women. If we are given over to fashion,
frivolity, and vice, does it follow that rights and privileges,
duties and responsibilities will not help us? If just governments
derive their powers from the consent of the governed, and
taxation without representation is tyranny, then Albany can help
us in just so much as a good and just government will help the
people who live under its rules and laws. No one would at this
day, if a friend to the negro, say to him, 'A vote can not help
you!' Then why say it to women?

"Our Woman's Rights Convention has now taken the broad platform
of 'Equal Rights,' and upon that will work in time to come. And
our meeting in New York seemed proof--if proof was wanting--that
all we need now is to ask and receive. Our worst enemy, our
greatest hindrance, is woman herself; and her indifference is the
legitimate result of long-denied privileges and responsibilities
of which she has not learned the necessity. If, as Mr. Beecher
asserted, 'to vote is a duty,' then it is the duty of every man
and woman to work to secure that right to every human being of
adult years.

"Since our meeting, the House of Representatives at Washington
has passed, by more than three to one, the amendment of the
Reconstruction Committee. If the Senate concurs, then, to save
the four million negroes of the South, or rather to save the
Republican party (the people agreeing), seventeen millions of
women, governed without their own consent, are proclaimed a
disfranchised class by the Constitution of the United States,
hitherto unpolluted by any such legislation. Let us, then, work
for this, too, that seventeen million women shall not be left
without the power considered so necessary to the negro for