titude--swearing,
chewing, smoking, drinking, gambling, libertinism, all winked
at--cash and brains giving him a free pass everywhere; another
quite unlike this for woman--she must be immaculate. One hair's
breadth deviation, even the touch of the hem of the garment of an
_accused_ sister, dooms her to the world's scorn. Man demands that
his wife shall be above suspicion. Woman must accept her husband as
he is, for she is powerless so long as she eats the bread of
dependence. Were man today dependent upon woman for his
subsistence, I have no doubt he would very soon find himself
compelled to square his life to an entirely new code, not a whit
less severe than that to which he now holds her. In moral
rectitude, we would not have woman less but man more.

It is to put an end to such heresies as the following, from the
Rochester Democrat, that all women should most earnestly labor.
That paper begs us not to forget, "that what may be pardonable in a
man, speaking of evils generally, may and perhaps ought to be
unpardonable in one of the presumably better sex; because there can
not and must not be perfect equality between men and women when the
disposition to do wrong is under discussion. Women are permitted to
be as much better than men as they choose; but there ought to be no
law, on or oft the statute books, recognizing their social and
political right to be worse or even as bad as men; and it is
shameful that intelligent women should claim such a right, or even
dare to mention it at all." No human being or class of human beings
would venture to talk thus to equals. It is only because women are
dependent on men that such cowardly impudence can be dished out to
them day after day by puny legislators and editors, themselves
often reeking in social corruption which should banish them forever
from the presence of womanhood. Yours for an even-handed scale in
morals as well as politics, SUSAN B. ANTHONY.

[Footnote 57: The committee reported January 30, 1871, John A. Bingham,
of Ohio, chairman. The minority report, signed by Benjamin F. Butler,
of Massachusetts, and William Loughridge, of Iowa, is perhaps the
strongest and most exhaustive argument ever written on woman's right to
vote under the Constitution. It is given in full in the History of
Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 464.]

CHAPTER XXIII.

FIR