he first?

Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a simpler
and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would take them
anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more unmitigated evil? Ah,
there come both answer and errand again. Raise the fallen--at
least, save the growing womanhood--stop the destruction that rushes
accelerating on, before you challenge new difficulty and danger with
an indiscriminate franchise. Are not these bad women the very "plenty"
that would out-balance you at the polls if you persist in trying the
"patch-and-plaster" remedy of suffrage and legislation.

Recognize the fact, the law, that your power, your high commission, is
inward, vital, formative and causal. Bring all questions of choice
or duty to this test; will it work at the heart of things, among the
realities and forces? Try your own life by this; remember that mere
external is falsehood and death. The letter killeth. Give up all that
is only of the appearance, or even chiefly so, in conscious
delight and motive--in person, surrounding, pursuit. Let your
self-presentation, your home-making and adorning, your social effort
and interest, your occupation and use of talent, all shape and issue
for the things that are essentially and integrally good, and that the
world needs to have prevail. Until you can do this, and induce such
doing, it is of little use to clamor for mere outward right or to
contend that it would be rightly applied.

This whole pamphlet is a magnificent illustration of that stupendous
and vital truth that the mission and sphere of woman is in the inward
life of man; that she must be the building up and governing power that
comes from those better impulses, those inward secrets of the heart
and sentiment that govern men to do all that is good and pure and holy
and keep them from all that is evil.

Mr. President, the emotions of women govern. What would be the result
of woman suffrage if applied to the large cities of this country is a
matter of speculation. What women have done in times of turbulence and
excitement in large cities in the past we know. Open that terrible
page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click
of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris
demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be
driven by political passion. Who led those blood-thirsty mobs? Who
shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman