they are fitted for. The most of the public duties in this
country do not require robust, physical health, or exposure to
what is base or unhealthy; and when those duties are imposed upon
anybody it will be only upon such persons as are fit for them.

My honorable friend spoke of the French revolution and the
horrors in which the women of Paris took part, and from that he
would argue that American wives and mothers and sisters are not
fit for the calm and temperate management of our American
republican life. His argument would require him by the same logic
to agree that republicanism itself is not fit for human society.
The argument is against popular government, whether by men or
women, and the Senator only applies to this new phase of the
claim of equal rights what his predecessors would have argued
against the rights which men now enjoy.

But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that woman with
her sentiment and emotional nature and liability to be moved by
passion and feeling should hold the office of Senator. Why, Mr.
President, the Senator's own speech is a refutation of its own
argument. Everybody knows that my honorable friend from Missouri
is one of the most brilliant men in this country. He is a
logician, he is an orator, he is a man of wide experience, he is
a lawyer entrusted with large interests; yet when he was called
upon to put forth this great effort of his, this afternoon, and
to argue this question which he thinks so clear, what did he do?
_He furnished the gush and the emotion and the eloquence, but
when he wanted an argument he had to call upon two women to
supply it._ If Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney have to make the
argument in the Senate of the United States for the
distinguished Senator from Missouri, it does not seem to me so
absolutely ridiculous that they should have, or that women like
them should have, seats in this body to make arguments of their
own.

Senator Blair closed the debate by saying in part:

I appeal to Senators not to decide this question upon the
arguments which have been offered here today for or against the
merits of the proposition. I appeal to them to decide it upon
that other principle to which I have adverted, whether one-half
of the American people shall be permitted to go into