What they want to do and to be is to be eligible
to such public duty as a majority of their fellow-citizens may think
they are fitted for. The majority of 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 they will be
imposed only upon such persons as are fit for them. But they want
that if the majority of the American people think a woman like Queen
Victoria, or Queen Elizabeth, or Queen Isabella of Spain, or Maria
Theresa of Hungary (the four most brilliant sovereigns of any sex in
modern history with only two or three exceptions), the fittest person
to be President of the United States, they may be permitted to
exercise their choice accordingly.

Old men are eligible to office, old men are allowed to vote, but we do
not send old men to war, or make constables or watchmen or overseers
of State prisons of old men; and it is utterly idle to suppose that
the fitness to vote or the fitness to hold office has anything to do
with the physical strength or with the particular mental qualities in
regard to which the sexes differ from each other.

Mr. President, 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 the
argument against popular government whether by man or woman, and the
Senator only applies to this new phase of the claim of equal rights
what his predecessors would argue against the rights we now have
applied to us.

But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that a 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 large 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 t