estion which goes to the arbitrament of the ballot-box. Who can doubt
that when the representative women of thought and culture, who are today
the moral backbone of our nation, sit in counsel with the best men of
the country, higher conditions will be the result?

Insurrectionary and revolutionary methods of righting wrongs, imaginary
or real, are pardonable only in the enslaved and disfranchised. The
moment any class of men possess the ballot, it is their weapon and their
shield. Men with a vote have no valid excuse for resorting to the use of
illegal means to fight their battles. When the masses of wage-earning
men are educated into a knowledge of their own rights and of their
duties to others, so that they are able to vote intelligently, they can
carry their measures through the ballot-box and will have no need to
resort to force. But so long as they remain in ignorance and are
manipulated by the political bosses they will continue to vote against
their own interests and turn again to violence to right their wrongs.

If men possessing the power of the ballot are driven to desperate means
to gain their ends, what shall be done by disfranchised women? There are
grave questions of moral, as well as of material interest in which women
are most deeply concerned. Denied the ballot, the legitimate means with
which to exert their influence, and, as a rule, being lovers of peace,
they have recourse to prayers and tears, those potent weapons of women
and children, and, when they fail, must tamely submit to wrong or rise
in rebellion against the powers that be. Women's crusades against
saloons, brothels and gambling-dens, emptying kegs and bottles into the
streets, breaking doors and windows and burning houses, all go to prove
that disfranchisement, the denial of lawful means to gain desired ends,
may drive even women to violations of law and order. Hence to secure
both national and "domestic tranquillity," to "establish justice," to
carry out the spirit of our Constitution, put into the hands of all
women, as you have into those of all men, the ballot, that symbol of
perfect equality, that right protective of all other rights.

CHAPTER XXVII--PAGE 468.

SOCIAL PURITY.

_First delivered at Chicago in the Spring of 1875, in the Sunday
afternoon Dime lecture course._

Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and
licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far
the greater suf