woman's nature with the ice of conventionalism, for fear she will
swell up, aye, and overflow the continent of manhood. There is no
danger. Trust to the nature God has given to humanity, and do not
except the nature He has given to this portion of humanity.

But I need not dwell upon such an argument before an audience who
have witnessed the bearing of women in this Convention. It is a
cool, aye, insolent assumption for man to prescribe the sphere of
woman. What is the sphere of woman? Clearly, you say, her powers,
her natural instincts and desires determine her sphere. Who,
then, best knows those instincts and desires? Is it he who has
all his knowledge at second-hand, rather than she who has it in
all her consciousness?

If, then, you find in the progress of the race hitherto, that
woman has revealed herself pure, true, and beautiful, and lofty
in spirit, just in proportion as she has enjoyed the right to
reveal herself; if this is the testimony of all past experience,
I ask you where you will find the beginning of an argument
against the claim of woman to the right to enlarge her sphere yet
more widely, than she has hitherto done. Wait until you see some
of these apprehended evils, aye, a little later even, than that,
until you see the natural subsidence of the reaction from the
first out-bound of their oppression, before you tell us it is not
safe or wise to permit woman the enlargement of her own sphere.

The argument which I have thus based upon the very nature of man,
and of humanity and God, is confirmed in every particular--is
most impregnably fortified on every point, by the facts of all
past experience and all present observation; and out of all this
evidence of woman's right and fitness to determine her own
sphere, I draw a high prophecy of the future. I look upon this
longing of hers for a yet higher and broader field, as an
evidence that God designed her to enter upon it.

"Want, is the garner of our bounteous Sire;
Hunger, the promise of its own supply."

I might even add the rest of the passage as an address to woman
herself, who still hesitates to assert the rights which she feels
to be hers and longs to enjoy; I might repeat to her in the words
of the same poet:

"We weep, because the good we seek