he defense of the state. Scarcely a Senator on
this floor is liable by law to perform a military or other
administrative duty, yet the rule so many set up against the right
of women to vote would disfranchise nearly this whole body.

But it unnecessary to grant that woman can not fight. History is
full of examples of her heroism in danger, of her endurance and
fortitude in trial, and of her indispensable and supreme service
in hospital and field; and in the handling of the deft and
horrible machinery and infernal agencies which science and art
have prepared and are preparing for human destruction in future
wars, woman may perform her whole part in the common assault or
the common defense. It is hardly worth while to consider this
trivial objection that she is incompetent for purposes of national
murder or of bloody self-defense as the basis of the denial of a
great fundamental right, when we consider that if that right were
given to her she would by its exercise almost certainly abolish
this great crime of the nations, which has always inflicted upon
her the chief burden of woe.

It will be admitted that the act of voting is operative in government
only as a means of deciding upon the adoption or rejection of measures
or of the selection of officers to enact, administer, and execute the
laws.

In the discharge of these functions it also must be admitted that
intelligence and conscience are the faculties requisite to secure
their proper performance.

In this day when woman has demonstrated that she is fully the
intellectual equal of man in the profound as well as in the politer
walks of learning--in art, science, literature, and, considering her
opportunities, that she is not his inferior in any of the professions
or in the great mass of useful occupations, while she is, in fact,
becoming the chief educator of the race and is the acknowledged
support of the great ministrations of charity and religion; when in
such great organizations as the suffrage associations, missionary
societies, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and even
upon the still larger scale of international action, she has exhibited
her power by mere moral influences and the inspiration of great
purposes, without the aid of legal penalties or even of tangible
inconveniences, to mold and direct the discordant thought and action
of thousands and millions of people scattere