light for woman. For eighteen centuries she has
been gradually but slowly rising from the condition of
drudge and servant for man, to become his helpmeet,
counselor and companion. As she has been advanced in the
social scale, our laws have kept pace with that advancement
and conferred upon her rights and privileges with
accompanying duties and responsibilities. She has not abused
those privileges, and has been found equal to the duties and
responsibilities. And the day is not far distant when the
refining and elevating influence of women will be as clearly
manifested in the political as it now is in the social
world.

Urged by all these considerations of right, and justice, and
expediency, and the strong conviction of duty, I approved
that act of which this bill contemplates the repeal, and it
became a law. To warrant my reconsidering that action, there
ought to be in the experience of the last two years
something to show that the reasons upon which it was founded
were unsound, or that the law itself was wrong or at least
unwise and inexpedient. My view of the teachings of this
experience is the very reverse of this. Women have voted,
and have the officers chosen been less faithful and zealous
and the legislature less able and upright? They have sat as
jurors, and have the laws been less faithfully and justly
administered, and criminals less promptly and adequately
punished? Indeed the lessons of this two years' experience
fully confirm all that has been claimed by the most ardent
advocate of this innovation.

In this territory women have manifested for its highest
interests a devotion strong, ardent, and intelligent. They
have brought to public affairs a clearness of understanding
and a soundness of judgment, which, considering their
exclusion hitherto from practical participation in political
agitations and movements, are worthy of the greatest
admiration and above all praise. The conscience of women is
in all things more discriminating and sensitive than that of
men; their sense of justice, not compromising or
time-serving, but pure and exacting; thei