or judgment? Has he forgotten the deed
of Jael, who slew the dreaded enemy of her country? Has he forgotten
Esther, who, by HER PETITION, saved her people and her country? Sir, I
might go through the whole of the sacred history of the Jews to the
advent of our Saviour, and find innumerable examples of women, who not
only took an active part in the politics of their times, but who are
held up with honor to posterity for doing so Our Saviour himself, while
on earth, performed that most stupendous miracle, the raising of
Lazarus from the dead, at _the petition of a woman_! To go from sacred
history to profane, does the gentleman there find it 'discreditable'
for women to take any interest or any part in political affairs? In the
history of Greece, let him read and examine the character of Aspasia,
in a country in which the character and conduct of women were more
restricted than in any modern nation, save among the Turks. Has he
forgotten that Spartan mother, who said to her son, when going out to
battle, 'My son, come back to me _with_ thy shield, or _upon_ thy
shield'? Does he not remember Cloelia and her hundred companions, who
swam across the river, under a shower of darts, escaping from Porsenna?
Has he forgotten Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, who declared that
her children were her jewels? And why? Because they were the champions
of freedom. Does he not remember Portia, the wife of Brutus and
daughter of Cato, and in what terms she is represented in the history
of Rome? Has he not read of Arria, who, under imperial despotism, when
her husband was condemned to die by a tyrant, plunged the sword into
her own bosom, and, handing it to her husband, said, 'Take it, Paetus,
it does not hurt,' and expired?

"To come to a later period,--what says the history of our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors? To say nothing of Boadicea, the British heroine in the time
of the Caesars, what name is more illustrious than that of Elizabeth?
Or, if he will go to the Continent, will he not find the names of Maria
Theresa of Hungary, the two Catharines of Russia, and of Isabella of
Castile, the patroness of Columbus, the discoverer in substance of this
hemisphere, for without her that discovery would not have been made?
Did she bring 'discredit' on her sex by mingling in politics? To come
nearer home,--what were the women of the United States in the struggle
of the Revolution? Or what would the men have been but for the
influence of the women of t