the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by
tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her
by ignorance--not only in respect to the right of suffrage but in
every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.

Senator Vest then entered into a long and elaborate discussion of the
resolution, in which he said:

Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular
government based on _the will of the people as expressed through
their suffrage_ is not only important but vitally so. If this
government which is based on _the intelligence of the people_,
shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature or
corrupt suffrage. If the Ship of State launched by our fathers
shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of
universal, unprepared suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be
taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else;
they never can do that. When any particular class or portion of
the community is once invested with this privilege _it is fixed,
accomplished and eternal_.[52]

The Senator who spoke last on this question refers to the
successful experiment in regard to woman suffrage in the
Territories of Wyoming and Washington. It is not upon the plains
of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman
suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and
sparsely-settled regions of this country must from the very
nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The
danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of
population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history.
Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large
cities? Where are the localities in which the strain upon popular
government must come?

The Senator from New Hampshire, who is so conspicuous in this
movement, appalled the country some months since by his ghastly
array of illiteracy in the Southern States.... He proposes to
give the negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly
unprepared as they are for it. In a convention some
two-years-and-a-half ago in the city of Louisville an
intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not
vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with
them if th