nted
anew with emphasis and feeling; and a demand is finally made for the
right of suffrage as the protection for women from all kinds of
oppression.

We do not care to discuss the wisdom of this conclusion; but from the
premises no man can dissent. It is unquestionably true that thousands of
women in America suffer an oppression little less cruel than slavery;
that they toil incessantly in shops and garrets for a pittance that half
sustains life, and at last drives them to guilt as the alternative of
starvation; it is true that women are shut out from the practice of the
liberal professions; it is true that in the trades to which they are
educated they often receive less pay than men for the same amount and
quality of work; it is true that the laws still bear unfairly upon them.
If the right of suffrage will open to them any means of earning bread
now forbidden them, if it will help in any way to give them an equal
chance with men in the world, they ought to have it. We are all alike
guilty of their wrongs, as long as they continue; it is not the wretch
who enslaves the needlewoman,--it is not the savage in whose "store" or
"emporium" the poorly paid shop-girl is forbidden to sit down for a
moment, and swoons away under the ordeal,--it is not the rogue who gives
a woman less wages than a man for a man's service,--it is not these and
their kind who are alone guilty, but society itself is guilty. The
reform of very great evils will be cheaply accomplished if women by
voting can right themselves. It must be confessed, to our shame, that we
have failed to right them; though it may at the same time be doubted
whether the elective franchise, which is claimed as the means of
justice, would not now belong to women, if it had been even generally
demanded. So far the responsibility is partly with woman herself, who
must also help to bear the blame for failure to ameliorate the condition
of her sex in the existing political state. Mrs. Dall is by no means
blind to this fact, and she speaks candidly to women, as she speaks
fearlessly to men. We think her arguments would have been more forcible
if they had been less complex. It is not worth while to argue the
intellectual capacity of women for the franchise in a country where it
is given to ignorant immigrants and freedmen. It was by no means
necessary to show woman's qualification for all the affairs of life, in
order to prove that she should not be hindered or limited in her
att