t in the hand of woman would cure the
wrongs she speaks of, he would favor female suffrage, but he
was firmly convinced that it would only aggravate their
wrongs. He could not fight Anna Dickinson.

ANNA DICKINSON: I certainly do not intend to fight Mr.
Collier. I believe I have the name of not being a
belligerent woman. Mr. Collier says sympathy is one thing
and logic is another. Very true! I did not speak of the
40,000 women in the State of Massachusetts who are wives of
drunkards, as a matter which shall appeal to your
sympathies, or move your tears. Mr. Collier says that these
women are to find their rights by influence at home.

Mr. COLLIER: That is what I mean.

Miss DICKINSON: That they are to do it by womanly and
feminine love, and I tell him that is the duty of this same
feminine element which is so admirable and adorable. I have
seen men on your street corners, as I have seen men on the
street corners of every city of America, with bloated faces,
with mangled forms, and eyes blackened by the horrible vice
and orgies carried on in their dens of iniquity and
drunkenness and sin. I have seen men with not a semblance of
humanity in their form or in their face, and not a sentiment
of manhood in their souls. I have seen these men made
absolute masters of wives and children; men who reel to
their homes night after night to beat some helpless child;
to beat some helpless woman. A woman was beaten here in
Chicago the other day until there was scarcely a trace of
the woman's face left, and scarcely a trace of the woman's
form remaining. Mr. Collier tells me, then, that these women
whose husbands reel home at 12, 1, 2, 3 o'clock at night, to
demolish the furniture, beat the children, and destroy their
wives' peace and lives--that these women are to find their
rights by influence, by argument, by tenderness. These
brutes who deserve the gallows if any human being can
deserve anything so atrocious in these days--are these
women, their wives, to find their safety, their security for
themselves and their children, by influence, through
argument and tenderness