d over separate States,
and sometimes even living in countries hostile to each other to the
accomplishment of great earthly or heavenly ends, it is unreasonable
to deny to woman the suffrage in political affairs upon the
false allegation that she is wanting in the very qualities most
indispensable and requisite for the proper exercise of this great
right.

The advocates of universal male suffrage have long since ceased
to deny the ballot to woman upon the ground that she is unfit or
incompetent to exercise it.

There is a class of high-stepping objectors, like Ouida, who decry the
sound judgment and moral excellence of woman as compared with man, but
in the same breath these people deny the suffrage to the masses of men
and advocate "the just supremacy of the fittest," so that no time need
be wasted in refutation of those malignant and libelous aspersions
upon our mothers, sisters, and wives, which, when carried to logical
conclusions by their own authors, deny the fundamental principles of
liberty to man and woman alike, and reassert in its baldest form the
dogma that "the existing system of electoral power all over the world
is absurd, and will remain so because in no nation is there the
courage, perhaps in no nation is there the intellectual power, capable
of putting forward and sustaining the logical doctrine of the just
supremacy of the fittest."

In fact the minority of the committee, and this is true of all honest,
intelligent men who believe in the republican system of government at
all, concede that woman has the capacity and moral fitness requisite
to exercise the ballot. That class of women represented by the author
of "Letters from a Chimney Corner," whose work has been adopted by
the minority as the basis of their report, speaking through the "fair
authoress," say that "if women were to be considered in their highest
and final estate as merely individual beings, and if the right to the
ballot were to be conceded to man as an individual, it might perhaps
he logically argued that women also possessed the inherent right to
vote." Let me read from the views of the minority on page 1:

The undersigned minority of the Committee of the Senate on Woman
Suffrage, to whom was referred Senate Resolution No. 5, proposing
an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to grant
the right to vote to the women of the United States, beg leave to
submit the following minority report, consistin