We have just seen one folly, one absurdity refuted by the simple process of trying an experiment. The time was when it was deemed altogether unwomanly, and repugnant to female delicacy and refinement, for a woman to ink the ends of her fingers in handling a pen; for a woman to be what was derisively called a "blue-stocking," or a literary woman. It was thought that nothing but pedantry, nothing but slatternly habits and neglected housekeeping, could come of it. But who would be willing to banish from the literary world to-day such names as Browning, Hemans, Stowe, and Gage? And if I were to fill out the catalogue of names, I might close my speech at the end of it, having tired you all with the length of the recital. So it was said that women should not appear on the public platform. But who now would banish the women who have delighted such vast congregations, and who have drawn such applause from all classes and conditions of men? Who, to-day, considers it improper for Lucy Stone, Anna Dickinson, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, to appear upon a public platform? Who is willing to shut the pulpit against Mrs. Mott, when she has filled it with such acceptance, in so many places, and on so many occasions? Step by step, woman has advanced toward her right position. Step by step, as she advanced, she has proved her right, to the satisfaction of caviling skepticism itself....

She would now go a step further. She demands the rights, not of womanhood, but of humanity. And I feel just as confident that what she demands will be conceded, in reference to her political rights, as that it has been conceded with regard to these other rights, which are now settled in the estimation of thinking and reasoning people. The tide sets that way, clearly and strongly. Kansas is not to go alone, in granting this right to woman. The agitation is to go on; and the more you resist the current of events, the more earnestly will the agitation be continued until reason shall be convinced; until prejudice shall be overcome by the power of conviction; until men are constrained, from very shame, to withdraw from a position which no argument, no experience can justify, which no consideration of decency will palliate.

One objection to our claim is, that the right of voting should not belong to human beings as individuals, but rather to households of human beings. This is not a denial of equality in all respects, but an allegation that the right belongs neither to the man nor to the woman, but to the household; and that for the household, as its representative, the man casts the ballot. Suppose I concede that, what then? Why should the head of the household, or rather the hand of the household, be masculine rather than feminine? We have heard the argument over and over again that woman should leave to man the counting-house, the work-bench, and all the duties supposed peculiarly to appertain to masculine humanity, and should attend to "household" matters. If, then, suffrage is a household matter, why should not woman attend to it, in her feminine capacity, as peculiarly within her domestic province, and relieve man from the interruption of his appropriate duties?

Rev. Mr. RAY inquired what was the basis for the right of suffrage, if suffrage was not, as Mr. Burleigh had said yesterday in another place, a natural right. If it does not belong to the individual whence does it come? The Sultan of Turkey may claim that the right belongs to him, and that he may delegate that right to whomsoever he will to assist him in the government of the people. But in a Republic the right must be in the individual; and if so, it belongs to woman as well as to man, to black as well as to white persons. If the right of suffrage is not a natural right, why has not the Constitutional Convention about to meet the right to limit the suffrage, if they think it will secure the best interest of the State?

FRANCES D. GAGE said: I have but little to say because it is almost two o'clock, and hungry and weary people are not good listeners to speeches. I shall confine my remarks therefore to one special point brought up this morning and not fully discussed. Sojourner Truth gave us the whole truth in about fifteen words: "If I am responsible for the deeds done in my body, the same as the white male citizen is, I have a right to all the rights he has to help him through the world." I shall speak for the slave woman at the South. I have always lifted my voice for her when I have spoken at all. I will not give up the slave woman into the hands of man, to do with her as he pleases hereafter. I know the plea that was made to me in South Carolina, and down in the Mississippi valley. They said, "You give us a nominal freedom, but you leave us under the heel of our husbands, who are tyrants almost equal to our masters." The former slave man of the South has learned his lesson of oppression and wrong of his old master; and they think the wife has no right to her earnings. I was often asked, "Why don't the Government pay my wife's earnings to me?" When acting for the Freedman's Aid Society, the orders came to us to compel marriage, or to separate families. I issued the order as I was bound to do, as General Superintendent of the Fourth Division under General Saxton. The men came to me and wanted to be married, because they said if they were married in the church, they could manage the women, and take care of their money, but if they were not married in the church the women took their own wages and did just as they had a mind to. But the women came to me and said, "We don't want to be married in the church, because if we are our husbands will whip the children and whip us if they want to; they are no better than old masters." The biggest quarrel I had with the colored people down there, was with a plantation man because I would not furnish a nurse for his child. "No, Nero," said I, "I can not hire a nurse for your child while Nancy works in the cotton field." "But what is we to do? I'se a poor miserable man and can't work half the time, and Nancy is a good strong hand; and we must have a nurse." He went away in utter disgust, and declared to the people outside that I had got the miserablest notion he had ever heard, to spoil a good field hand like his Nancy to nurse her own baby.

We were told the other day by Wendell Phillips, upon the Anti-Slavery platform, that it takes people forty years to outgrow an old idea. The slave population of the South is not yet removed a hundred years from the barbarism of Africa, where women have no rights, no privileges, but are trampled under foot in all the savageism of the past. And the slave man has looked on to see his master will everything as he willed, and he has learned the lesson from his master. Mr. Higginson told us that the slave-master never understood the slave. I know that to be the fact. Neither does man understand woman to-day, because she has always been held subservient to him. Now it is proposed to give manhood the suffrage in all these Southern States, and to leave the poor slave woman bound under the ban of the direst curse of slavery to him who is the father of her children. It is decreed upon all the statute books of slavery, that the child shall follow the condition of the mother. That has been the decree from the beginning of this awful slave system; that the whitest woman, the child of a slave mother, whose hair curled down to her waist, and whose blue eyes of beauty were a lure to the statesmen of the South, should be a slave, though the Governor of the State were her father. Are you to leave her there yet, and desecrate marriage, by making it such a bond of slavery that the woman shall say, "I do not want to be married, to suffer oppression!" Are you to force prostitution and wrong upon those people by these unjust laws? Are you to compel wickedness and crime? Are you going to let it stand upon the statute books of the Southern States that the only woman free to work for her own child shall be the mother of illegitimate children? That is the consequence of what you are doing to the people who in all time past, since they have lived upon this continent, have been denied the right of sacred marriage; and who must have, as Wendell Phillips tells us, forty years to outgrow the past, or to educate them.

We are told by Mr. Phillips to flood the South with spelling-books. Who is to carry them there? Who, to-day, is teaching the Southern people;—for I am talking now in behalf of the colored woman of the South, forgetting my own degradation. Who have carried the spelling-book to the South? The women of the North, gathering up their strength, have been sent down by all these great societies to teach. The colored men of the South are to vote, while they deny the ballot to their teacher! It is said that women do not want to vote in this country. I tell you, it is a libel upon womanhood. I care not who says it. I am in earnest. They do want to vote. Fifty-two thousand pulpits in this country have been teaching women the lesson that has been taught them for centuries, that they must not think about voting. But when 52,000 pulpits, or 52,000 politicians, at the beginning of this war, lifted up their voices and asked of women, "Come out and help us," did they stand back? In every hamlet, in every village, in every cabin, and every palace, in every home in the whole United States, they rose up and went to work. They worked for the Government; they worked for the nation; they worked for their sons, their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their friends. They worked night and day. Who found women to stand back when this great public opinion that had been crushing them so long and forbidding them to work, at last lifted itself up and said, "You may work"? (Applause).

I have been traveling all winter long, with a few intervals of rest, talking not upon Equal Rights, but upon the subject of Temperance; and whenever I said to my crowded audiences that we must give to woman the right to vote that she may purify the nation of this great sin, there went up shouts and clapping of hands of men and women. They are ready for this work. What we want is to crystallize the public opinion of all ranks of society in its favor. There is great fear that if woman is allowed to vote, she will lose something of her high and excellent character. If it is right for woman to have the suffrage, it is not right to talk of expediency. If giving woman the ballot will cause her to lose her prestige, it is because she ought to lose it. If she gains physical strength and loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for nothing and cares for nothing but its own selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with joy unspeakable. My strong hands have tilled the fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed the horse, and brought the wood to the door; have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be shod. These are things I do not often tell in public. I have braved public opinion; I have tilled my garden; I have brought myself up from fainting weakness occasioned by accident and broken bones. I have taken care of myself, supported myself, and asked nothing from the world; I find my womanhood not one bit degraded. (Applause). A thousand times in the last years, in this struggle for bread, have I been asked, "Why don't you let your sons support you?" My answer is, "My six sons have their own duties. My six boys have their own labors. God gives me strength to earn my own bread, and I will do it as long as I can." (Applause). That is what I want to teach the womanhood of the country. I did not mean to talk so long; but I assure you I talk in earnest. If I sometimes, by a slip of the tongue, make some little mistake—for I have not been educated in the schools, (a log cabin schoolhouse in the wilderness gave me all I have)—you will excuse me, for I mean no injustice to any one. And if to-night it will not crowd some better woman or man from the platform, I shall be glad to speak to you again.

Mrs. MOTT.—The argument that has been made that women do not want to vote is like that which we had to meet in the early days of the Anti-Slavery enterprise, that the slaves did not want to be free. I remember that in one of our earliest Woman's Rights Conventions, in Syracuse, a resolution was offered to the effect that as the assertion that the slave did not want his freedom, and would not take it if offered to him, only proved the depth of his degradation, so the assertion that woman had all the rights she wanted only gave evidence how far the influence of the law and customs, and the perverted application of the Scriptures, had encircled and crushed her. This was fifteen or twenty years ago. Times are altered since. In the temperance reformation, and in the great reformatory movements of our age, woman's powers have been called into action. They are beginning to see that another state of things is possible for them, and they are beginning to demand their rights. Why should this church be granted for such a meeting as this, but for the progress of the cause? Why are so many women present, ready to respond to the most ultra and most radical sentiments here, but that woman has grown and is able to assume her rights?

In many of the States the laws have been so modified that the wife now stands in a very different position as regards the right of property and other rights, from that which she occupied fifteen or twenty years ago. You see the same advance in the literary world. I remember when Maria Edgeworth and her sister first published their works, that they were afraid to publish their own name, and borrowed the name of their father. So Frances Power Cobbe was not able to write over her own name, and she issued her "Intuitive Morals" without a name; and her father was so much pleased with the work, without knowing it was his daughter's, that it led to an acknowledgment after a while.

STEPHEN S. FOSTER: Will you give us the evidence that the statement that the women of this country do not want the ballot is not true? I should be glad to believe that; but in my experience the worst opposition to the progress of Woman's Rights has come from woman herself. The greatest indifference to the cause is to be found among women, and not among men. I wish it were not so. I hope I am mistaken. But I believe nine out of every ten of our public speakers will tell you that they find more help, more sympathy from men than from women.

Rev. S. J. MAY: I should like to have that question settled, so far as the women present are concerned. Will as many of you as will vote when the right is awarded to you, please to manifest it by rising.

Nearly the whole of the ladies present immediately arose. Indeed, those on the platform, could not see a single woman who retained her seat.

Mrs. GAGE: During the last fifteen years, with the utmost industry I could use in ascertaining the public opinion in this country, I have never found one solitary instance of a woman, whom I could meet alone by her fireside, where there was no fear of public opinion, or the minister, or the law-maker, or her father, or her husband, who did not tell me she would like to vote. [Applause]. I never found a slave in my life, who, removed from the eye of the people about him, would not tell me he wanted liberty—never one. I have been in the slave States for years. I have been in the slave-pens, and upon the plantations, and have stood beside the slave as he worked in the sugar cane and the cotton-field; and I never found one who dared in the presence of white men to say he wanted freedom. When women and young girls are asked if they want to vote, they are almost always in just that situation where they are afraid to speak what they think; and no wonder they so often say they do not want to vote.

EVENING SESSION.

The meeting was called to order by the President, Mrs. Mott, who introduced as the first speaker Col. Charles E. Moss, of Missouri.

Mr. MOSS said: This is a subject upon which I have thought for a number of years; and I have become fully convinced that no reason can be assigned for extending the right of suffrage to any of the male sex, that does not equally apply to the female.

When our fathers formed the national Constitution, they made it their duty to secure to every State a republican form of government. No government can be republican in form, unless it is so in substance and in fact; based upon the consent of the governed. After the troublesome war we have just passed through, we are called upon not only to reconstruct the ten unrepresented States of the nation, but to purify the republicanism of our government in the Northern States and make it more consistent with our professions. It is a fit time, then, to take up the subject of suffrage, and to base it upon a well-established principle. Some say that the right of suffrage is a privilege, to be given or withheld at pleasure. That does not seem to me a very safe foundation for so important a right. It is either a privilege or a natural right. If we recognize it as a natural right we have a peaceable, safe, legal mode of resistance against the disfranchisement of the people. If we admit it to be a privilege to be granted or withheld, no man and no woman has any legal right to interpose any objection to his own disfranchisement. But I see that our friend has come in who was expected first to address you, and I will not take up more of your time.

PARKER PILLSBURY was next introduced and said: The resolutions just read refer to the comparative longevity of nations and of individual men, and of their respective performance, while existence lasts.

Among nations have arisen Franklins and Washingtons, Humboldts and Howards; but what individual nation of any period has been the Plato or Pythagoras, the Howard or the Humboldt of all the rest? or has achieved proportionally, so long a life? or expired at last in sunsets of serenity and glory, and been embalmed and enshrined in the tears and gratitude of mankind? It is often said that the life of a nation is as the life of an individual; with beginning, progress, decay, and dissolution. But the resemblance holds only in part. Consciousness comes to an individual, and self-respect; and from that hour growth and greatness (it may be) begin. But with nations it is not so. The world has not made the same demand of nations as of individuals, and so nothing is expected of them. Nations, hitherto, were badly brought up. In the light of a thousand years hence, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be "darker ages" than the eighth and ninth are to-day. Accepting three-score and ten as the common life of an individual, a degree at least of honorable manhood is often achieved, both in personal virtues, and in noble performance.

The canticles of the Almanac used to run:

At ten, a child; at twenty, wild; At thirty, strong, if ever; At forty, wise; at fifty, rich; At sixty, good, or never.

But at what age has any nation of any period or place become wise, rich, or even strong; to say nothing of good?

The Roman Catholic Church is older than any civilized government on the globe. Lord Macaulay says:

It is the only institution left standing which carries the mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when tigers and camel leopards bounded in the Flavian Amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, compared with the line of the supreme Pontiffs, traced back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond stretches the august dynasty, until it fades into the twilight of fable! She saw the commencement of all the governments on the globe, and of all the ecclesiastical establishments now existing; and there is no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all!"

The world has an accepted chronology of six thousand years. Its history and experience in government reach back forty centuries. It would be an interesting inquiry with what results governments have existed so long, especially in the later periods and among the most enlightened of the nations. Charles the Fifth boasted that his empire saw no setting sun. It included Spain and all her vast American provinces, over large part of which to-day wave our own Stars and Stripes. The national escutcheon bore two globes; and the coin, the two Pillars of Hercules, the then acknowledged boundary of the Eastern world, with the motto "More beyond." Spain, under Philip Second, dictated law, learning, religion, especially religion, to unknown millions, not alone in Europe, but in North and South America, Africa and all the Indies. And now in the remote south-western corner of Europe is all that remains of this mighty power of the sixteenth century.

France in the eighth century under Charlemagne, was another mistress of the globe. And Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope, "Sovereign of the New Empire of the West." And yet, in less than fifty years all that mountain of magnificence exploded; and many rival nations sprang from its lava streams of blood and ashes! A remnant, too, of France was preserved; and its history for almost eight hundred years, "may be traced, like the tracks of a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood;" until it culminated in the French Revolution ("suicide of the eighteenth century," as Carlyle calls that terrible phenomenon) and Napoleon Bonaparte! And he also summoned to his coronation the Roman Pontiff, like his great predecessor of a thousand years before. And beneath the solemn arches and arcades of Notre Dame, was crowned by Pope Pius the Seventh—"The high and mighty Napoleon, the first Emperor of the French!" Plunging remorselessly into the most desolating wars, he soon astonished the civilized world with his successes. He made himself master of almost half the globe. The reign of Napoleon was an earthquake which, for fifteen years, shook the sea and the land, carrying down innumerable human lives in the general cataclysm. But he sunk at last! He aspired to the very heaven of heavens in his ambitions; and his conquests were the wonder and terror of mankind. But he left France smaller, weaker, poorer, and more debased and depraved than he found her.

Just eight hundred years ago last September, William the Norman landed in Britain and commenced its subjugation. Since that period, the history of Great Britain has not differed materially from that of other European nations. As the sun is said never to set on the British domain, so the thunder of its war-guns has reverberated almost continually in some corner of the globe. To trace her history, however rapidly, even had we time, could give no pleasure to this audience, and would add nothing to my present argument. It is sufficient to say that, with real estate almost immeasurable, with personal property incalculable, with a wealth of material resources of every conceivable description, absolutely unknown and unknowable, she yet contrives to support her costly establishment by a system of oppressive taxation almost unparalleled in the annals of the human race. Some of you must remember the graphic but not exaggerated description of British taxation given by Sidney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. It was almost fifty years ago; but no less revenue must be raised in some way, still. He said:

We have taxes upon everything which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the feet; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and in the waters under the earth; taxes on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material, taxes on every fresh value added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauces which pamper man's appetite, and the drugs that restore him to health; taxes on the ermine which decorates the judge, and on the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt and the rich man's spice; on the ribbons of the bride, on the shroud of the corpse, and the brass nails of the coffin. The school-boy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth rides his taxed horse, with a taxed saddle and bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz-bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent., and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel. His virtues are then handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he is gathered to his fathers, to be taxed no more!

And we are told, what is doubtless true, that the enormous debt of Great Britain is the chain that binds its many parts together, and preserves its nationality. No nation, then, ever maintained a more precarious existence. Chartism in Scotland, Repeal in Ireland, Trades Strikes everywhere, East India Wars, Irish Famines, Fenianism, Reform Leagues, Reform Riots, Bread Riots—all these attest how volcanic is its under stratum, and what dangers impend above. In some of the gloomy gorges of the Alps, there are seasons of the year when no traveler passes but at the expense of life, on account of the terrible "thunderbolts of snow" that hang suspended on the sides or summits of the mountains. None can know their hour; but descend they must, by all the laws of gravitation, with resistless energy, sweeping all before them. At such times, all who pass creep along with trembling caution. They move in single file, at a distance from each other, hurrying fast as possible, with velvet step, avoiding all noise, even whispers—the guides meanwhile muffling the bells of the mules, lest the slightest vibration communicated to the air should untie the tremulous mass overhead and entomb them forever. Great Britain, with her frightful debt, her terrible taxation, her dissatisfied, restless, beggared myriads of the lower working classes, her remorseless aristocracy, her bloated spirit of caste, her enforced but heartless religion, has hung a more terrible avalanche over her head than ever leaped down the heights of the Tyrol.

Such are examples of success or failure in attempts at government, among the proudest and most prosperous nations of the Old World, in modern and what are called enlightened times. If seventy years be the life of a man, what should be the life of a nation? Half the children born die under five years old. But proportionably a greater mortality prevails among nations and governments. Not one nation has ever yet attained an honorable manhood. There is something rotten in the state of every Denmark.

Will you tell me Democracy, Republicanism, consecrated by Christianity, is the remedy for all these ills? Let us look, then, at the best example. Our own nation is not yet a hundred years old, but it had behind it in the beginning, the chronicles of forty or sixty centuries, written mostly in tears and blood. At the end of an eight years' revolutionary war, our new governmental columns were reared, not, like some pagan temples, on human skulls, but on the imbruted bodies and extinguished souls of five hundred thousand chattel slaves. We had our Declaration of Independence, our war of Revolution, and a new Constitution and code of laws. We had a Washington for our first President, a John Jay for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a constellation of senators, statesmen, and sages who challenged the respect and admiration of mankind. We closed that dispensation with James Buchanan as Chief Magistrate, and Roger B. Taney as Chief-Justice, with his diabolical Dred Scott Decision, and with a war of Treason and Rebellion which deluged the land in the blood of more than half a million of men. We had multiplied our slaves to four millions, with new cruelties and horrors added to the system, and at least ten generations of them were lost in unknown graves. The new Republican President pledged his official word and honor to the rebels already in arms, that, would they but return to their allegiance, he would favor amendments to the Constitution that should not only render slave property more secure than ever before, but also make all its old guarantees and safeguards, Fugitive Slave law and all, forever "irrevocable" by any act or decree of Congress! So were we endeavoring to bulwark and balustrade our slave-system about, in the name of a Christian Republicanism, when it was struck by the lightnings of a righteous retribution, and the world is rid of it forever. And our old nationality went down in the ruin. Now we are divided, distracted, deranged in currency, commerce, diplomacy, with State and Federal liabilities resting on the people, amounting to not less than six thousand millions of dollars, not to speak of current expenditures which are also appalling; with a President whose weakness finds no parallel but in his wickedness, with a Secretary of State who has become his full counterpart in both, and a Senate too cowardly, or too corrupt, to impeach the one or to seek the removal of the other!

For more than two years we have been attempting to restore the fragments of our once boasted Union. With the history and experience of forty centuries shining back upon us, so far we have failed. And under any existing or proposed policy we shall fail. By all the claims of justice and righteousness, we deserve to fail; for we are still defying those claims. The son of Priam, a priest of Apollo, was commissioned to offer a sacrifice to propitiate the god of the sea. But the offering not being acceptable, there came up two enormous serpents from the deep and attacked the priest and his two sons who stood with him at the altar. The father attempted to defend his sons; but the serpents falling upon him, enfolded him and them in their complicated coils, and strangled them to a terrible death. Let this government beware. The very union proposed will only bind and hold us together as in the deadly folds of a serpent more fearful than all the fabled monsters of the past! And so, hitherto, republics are no exception to the general law. Rickets in infancy, convulsions in childhood, or premature rheumatisms, have brought the nations of history to untimely deaths. Material interests may flourish, and nations grow great and powerful, make wars and conquests, and rule the world. The ancients did all this, but where are those haughty omnipotences now? Charlemagne did but little less, and in half a century his magnificence was brought to nought. Spain survived a little longer in its glory and grandeur; but now the scanty blood-splash on the map describes it well. The United States, young among the nations, the mother earth six thousand years old at their birth, wet-nursed by forty centuries of history, and schooled by all the experience of the ages, with almost half a globe for their inheritance, with Christianity faith and Republicanism their form of government, they survived a precocious childhood and then fell a victim to their own vices and crimes. To-day they are in the hands of many physicians, though of doubtful reputation, who seem far less desirous to cure the patient than to divide and share the estate.

My main point is this—we have had enough of the past in government. It is time to change. Literally almost, more than metaphorically, the "times are rotten ripe." We come to-day to demand—first an extension of the right of suffrage to every American citizen, of whatever race, complexion or sex. Manhood or male-hood suffrage is not a remedy for evils such as we wish removed. The Anti-Slavery Society demands that; and so, too, do large numbers of both the political parties. Even Andrew Johnson at first recommended it, in the reconstruction of the rebel States, for three classes of colored men. The New York Herald, in the exuberance of its religious zeal, demanded that "members of Christian Churches" be added as a fourth estate to the three designated by the President. The Woman's Rights Society contemplated suffrage only for woman. But we, as an EQUAL RIGHTS Association, recognize no distinctions based on sex, complexion or race. The Ten Commandments know nothing of any such distinctions. No more do we. The right of suffrage is as old, as sacred and as universal as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is indeed the complement and safeguard of these and all civil and political rights to every citizen. The right to life would be nothing without the right to acquire and possess the means of its support. So it were mockery to talk of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, until the ballot in the hand of every citizen seals and secures it. The right of the black man to a voice in the government was not earned at Olustee or Port Hudson. It was his when life began, not when life was paid for it under the battle-axe of war. It was his with Washington and Jefferson, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln. Not one of them could ever produce a higher, holier claim. Nor can any of us. We are prating about giving the right of suffrage to black male citizens, as complacently as we once gave our compassion and corn to famishing Ireland. But this famine of freedom and justice exists because we have produced it. Had our fleets and armies robbed Ireland of its last loaf, and left its myriads of inhabitants lean, ghastly skeletons, our charity would not have been more a mockery when we sent them bread to preserve them alive, than it is now when we talk of giving the ballot to those whom God created free and equal with ourselves.

And in the plenitude of our generosity, we even propose to extend the gift to woman also. It is proposed to make educated, cultivated, refined, loyal, tax-paying, government-obeying woman equal to the servants who groom her horses, and scour the pots and pans of her kitchen. Our Maria Mitchells, our Harriet Hosmers, Harriet Beecher Stowes, Lydia Maria Childs, and Lucretia Motts, with millions of the mothers and matrons of quiet homes, where they preside with queenly dignity and grace, are begging of besotted, debauched white male citizens, legal voters, soaked in whisky, simmered in tobacco, and parboiled in every shameless vice and sin, to recognize them also as human, and graciously accord to them the rights of intelligent beings!

And, singularly enough, in some of the States, it is proposed to grant the prayer. But the wisest and best men have no idea that they are only restoring what they have so long held by force, based on fraud and falsehood. They only propose to give woman the boon which they claim was theirs by heavenly inheritance. But they are too late with their sublime generosity. For God gave that when he gave life and breath, passions, emotions, conscience, and will. Give gold, give lands, give honors, give office, give title of nobility, if you must: but talk not of giving natural, inalienable and heaven-derived endowments. God alone bestows these. He alone has them to give. Our trade in the right of suffrage is contraband. It is bold buccaneering on the commerce of the moral universe. If we have our neighbor's right of suffrage and citizenship in our keeping, no matter of what color, or race, or sex, then we have stolen goods in our possession—and God's search-warrant will pursue us forever, if those goods be not restored. And then we impudently assert that "all just governments derive their powers, from the consent of the governed." But when was the consent of woman ever asked to one single act on all the statute books? We talk of "trial by jury of our peers!" In this country of ours, women have been fined, imprisoned, scourged, branded with red hot irons and hung; but when, or where, or for what crime or offense, was ever woman tried by a jury of her peers?

Suffrage was never in the hands of tyrants or of governments, but by usurpation. It was never given by them to any of us. We brought it; not bought it; nor conquered it; nor begged it; nor earned it; nor inherited it. It was man's inalienable, irrepealable, inextinguishable right from the beginning. It is so still; the same yesterday, to-day, and while earthly governments last. It came with the right to see and hear; to breathe and speak; to think and feel; to love and hate; to choose and refuse; or it did not come at all. The right to see came with the eye and the light: did it not? and the right to breathe, with the lungs and the air; and all these from the same infinite source. And has not also the moral and spiritual nature its inalienable rights? Have the mere bodily organs, which are but the larder of worms, born of the dust, and dust their destiny—have they power and prerogative that are denied to the reason, the understanding, the conscience, the will, those attributes which constitute responsibility, accountability, and immortality? Or shall God give the power to choose, or refuse obedience to his law and reign, leaving the human will free as his own; and must mortal man, the mushroom of yesterday and perished to-morrow, usurp a higher and more dreadful prerogative, and compel support of and submission to laws in which the subject has no voice in making, executing, or even consenting, on pain of perpetual imprisonment, banishment, or death?

Must a brave soldier fight and bleed for the government, and, pruned of limbs, plucked of eyes, and scarred all over with the lead and iron hail of war—must he now hobble on his crutches up to a Republican, Democratic, yea, and a Christian throne, and beg the boon of a ballot in that government, in defense of which he periled all, and lost all but bare life and breath, only because an African instead of a more indulgent sun looked upon him or his ancestors in their allotment of life? And then, when the claim of immortal manhood is superadded, the inalienable rights of the soul, in and of themselves, the rights of the reason, the understanding, the conscience, the will—what desperation is that which treads down all these claims, and rushes into seats of higher authority than were ever claimed by the eternal God, and denies him that right altogether! No white male citizen was ever born with three ballots in his hand, one his own by birthright, and to be used without restraint, the others to be granted, given to women and to colored men at his pleasure or convenience! Such an idea should never have outraged our common humanity. And any bill or proposal for what is called "manhood suffrage," while it ignores womanhood suffrage, whether coming from the President or the Republican party and sanctioned by the Anti-Slavery Society, should be repudiated as at war with the whole spirit and genius of a true Democracy, and a deadly stab into the very heart of justice itself.

I have referred to the age of the Roman Catholic Church. Lord Macaulay, in accounting for her astonishing longevity as compared with other institutions, turns with felicitous insight to female influence as one of the principal causes. In her system, he says, she assigns to devout women spiritual functions, dignities, and even magistracies. In England, if a pious and devout woman enter the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her sex, she does so without any authority from the Church. Indeed, the Protestant Church places the ban of its reprobation on any such irregularity. "At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be Foundress and First Superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Jails." But even Macaulay overlooks another element of power and permanence in the economy of the Catholic Church. God, as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Ghost, might inspire reverence and dread only in hearts that, at the shrine of the ever blessed Mary, Mother of God, would kindle into humble, holy and lasting love. Frances Power Cobbe, though deprecating the doctrine of "Mariolatry," as she terms the worship of the Virgin, yet says of it, "The Catholic world has found a great truth, that love, motherly tenderness and pity is a divine and holy thing, worthy of adoration.... What does this wide-spread sentiment regarding this new divinity indicate? It can surely only point to the fact that there was something lacking in the elder creed, which, as time went on, became a more and more sensible deficiency, till at last the instinct of the multitude filled it up in this amazing manner." When Theodore Parker, in his morning prayer on a beautiful summer Sunday, addressed the All-loving as "Our Father and our Mother," he struck a chord which will one day vibrate through the heart of universal humanity. It was a thought worth infinitely more than all the creeds of Christendom.

What if woman should even abuse the use of the ballot at first? Man has been known to fail at first in a new pursuit. A maker of microscopes told me that, in a new attempt on a different kind of object-glass, he failed forty-nine times, but the fiftieth was a complete success. The poet of Scotland intimates that even Creative Nature herself improved at a second trial;

"Her 'prentice hand she tried on man; And then she made the lasses, o!"

Must we be told that woman herself does not ask the ballot? Then I submit to such, if such there be, the question is not one of privilege, but of duty—of solemn responsibility. If woman does not desire the ballot, demand it, take it, she sins against her own nature and all the holiest instincts of humanity, and can not too soon repent. After all, the question of suffrage is one of justice and right. Unless human government be in itself an unnatural and impious usurpation, whoever renders it support and submission has a natural right to an equal voice in enacting and executing the laws. Nor can one man, or millions on millions of men acquire or possess the power to withhold that right from the humblest human being of sane mind, but by usurpation, and by rebellion against the constitution of the moral universe. It would be robbery, though the giving of the right should induce all the predicted and dreaded evils of tyrants, cowards and white male citizens. Be justice done though the heavens fall and the hells arise! Nay, it is only justice, reared as a lightning-rod, that can shield any governmental fabric when the very heavens are falling in righteous retribution.

The past mortality must last among nations, so long as they set at nought the Divine economy and purpose in their formation. The human body may yield to decay and die, though the soul be imperishable and eternal. But nations, like souls, need not die. Streams of new life flow into them, like rivers into the sea; and why should not the sea and the nations on its shores, roll on together with the ages? When governments shall learn to lay their foundations in righteousness, with eternal justice the chief corner-stone; when equal and impartial liberty shall be the acknowledged birthright of all, then will national life begin to be prolonged; and the death of a nation, were it possible, should be as though more than a Pleiad had expired. No more would nation then lift up sword against nation; and the New Jerusalem would indeed descend from God out of heaven and dwell among men.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY made an appeal for contributions to the funds of the Association, to enable it to carry on its work, especially in Kansas.

Mrs ROSE said: After all, we come down to the root of all evil—to money. It is rather humiliating, after the discourse that we have just heard, that told us of the rise, and progress, and destruction of nations, of empires, and of republics, that we have to come down to dollars and cents. We live in an entirely practical age. I can show you in a few words that if we only had sufficient of that root of all evil in our hands, there would be no need of holding these meetings. We could obtain the elective franchise without making a single speech. Give us $1,000,000, and we will have the elective franchise at the very next session of our Legislature. (Laughter and applause). But as we have not the $1,000,000 we want 1,000,000 voices. There are always two ways of obtaining an object. If we had had the money, we could have bought the Legislature and the elective franchise long before now. But as we have not, we must create a public opinion, and for that we must have voices.

I have always thought I was convinced not only of the necessity but of the great importance of obtaining the elective franchise for woman; but recently I have become satisfied that I never felt sufficiently that importance until now. Just read your public papers and see how our Senators and our members of the House are running round through the Southern States to hold meetings, and to deliver public addresses. To whom? To the freedmen. And why now, and why not ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago? Why do they get up meetings for the colored men, and call them fellow-men, brothers, and gentlemen? Because the freedman has that talisman in his hands which the politician is looking after? Don't you perceive, then, the importance of the elective franchise? Perhaps when we have the elective franchise in our hands, these great senators will condescend to inform us too of the importance of obtaining our rights.

You need not be afraid that when woman has the franchise, men will ever disturb her. I presume there are present, as there always are such people, those of timid minds, chicken-hearted, who so admire and respect woman that they are dreadfully afraid lest, when she comes to the ballot-box, rude, uncouth, and vulgar men will say something to disturb her. You may set your hearts all at rest. If we once have the elective franchise, upon the first indication that any man will endeavor to disturb a woman in her duty at the polls, Congress will enact another Freedman's Bureau—I beg pardon, a Freedwoman's Bureau—to protect women against men, and to guard the purity of the ballot-box at the same time. I have sometimes been asked, even by sensible men, "If woman had the elective franchise, would she go to the polls to mix with rude men?" Well, would I go to the church to mix with rude men? And should not the ballot-box be as respectable, and as respected, and as sacred as the church? Aye, infinitely more so, because it is of greater importance. Men can pray in secret, but must vote in public. (Applause). Hence the ballot-box, of the two, ought to be the most respected; and it would be if women were once there; but it never will be until they are there.

Our rights are as old as humanity itself. Yet we are obliged to ask man to give us the ballot, because he has it in his own hand. It is ours, and at the same time we ask for it; and have sent our petitions to Congress. We have been told that the Republic is not destroyed; it has been destroyed root and branch, because, if it were not, there would be no need to reconstruct it. And we have asked Congress, in the reconstruction, to place it upon a sound foundation. Why have all former republics vanished out of existence? Simply because they were built upon the sand. In the erection of a building, in proportion to the height of the walls must be the depth and soundness of the foundation. If the foundation is shallow or unsound, the higher you raise your superstructure the surer its downfall. That is the reason a republic has not existed as long as a monarchy, because it embraced principles of human rights in its superstructure which it denied in its foundation. Hence, before this Republic could count a hundred years, it has had one of the mightiest revolutions that ever occurred in any country or in any period of human existence. Its foundation was laid wrong. It made a republic for white men alone. It discriminated against color; it discriminated against sex; and at the same time it pronounced that all men are created free and equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It raised its superstructure to the clouds; and it has fallen as low as any empire could fall. It is divided. A house divided against itself can not stand. A wrong always operates against itself and falls back on the wrong-doer. We have proclaimed to the world universal suffrage; but it is universal suffrage excluding the negro and the woman, who are by far the largest number in this country. It is not the majority that rules here, but the minority. White men are in the minority in this nation. White women, black men, and black women compose the large majority of the nation. Yet in spite of this fact, in spite of common sense, in spite of justice, while our members of Congress can prate so long about justice, and human rights, and the rights of the negro, they have not the moral courage to say anything for the rights of woman.

In proportion to power is responsibility. Our Republican senators and members of Congress have taken upon themselves great power. They have made great professions. There is a very good maxim, "Of him to whom much is given, much shall be required." In proportion to their claims to be friends of human freedom, lovers of human rights, do we demand of them our rights and justice.

It is a shame to talk about licensing a social evil. It is a shame to this Republic. It is a violation of woman's nature. It is an insult to womanhood; and if woman has one drop of pure blood stirring in her heart, she must revolt against it. At the same time, I say to the Legislature that, if you enact laws against social evils, whatever those laws are, let them be alike for man and for woman. (Applause.) If you want to derive a revenue from the corruption of the community, let it be drawn alike from both sexes. The social evil belongs to both; the social remedy must belong to both. Do not degrade woman any more than she is already degraded. Perchance she is driven, through your injustice, to that step to maintain her wretched existence, because every office of emolument is barred against her. Let woman have the franchise; let all the avenues of society be thrown open before her, according to her powers and her capacities, and there will be no need to talk about social evils.

Major JAMES HAGGERTY said: It is no new thing for me to be found among Anti-Slavery people. I believe it was among Anti-Slavery people that I received my American culture. I see the old faces here upon this platform and in this house—some that I first met when I landed in this country, in 1856—Parker Pillsbury, as remorseless as ever; Mrs. Stanton, as bold and strong for the truth as ever. I see the same uncompromising people here, and I feel that I have been as uncompromising as any of them; for, although I have been and am identified with the Republican party in politics, no man ever heard me, on any platform, compromise the rights of another. Woman's Rights is an idea against which my prejudices array themselves, but my logic says, if you would be a true man, you must raise your voice for equal rights. (Applause.) I have seen the effect of the suffrage. In the District of Columbia, during the election, I saw men who had been called doughfaces walk up to the black man and profess to be so much more Anti-Slavery than the best Anti-Slavery men, that I have got the idea that it will not be five years before the northern Democrat will be swearing to the black men that he has negro blood in his veins: (Laughter.) ...

I come upon this platform to-night to identify myself with this new effort. I hope you may prosper; and so far as a dollar of mine, or my voice may go, you shall have it. I confess candidly that it is logic that drives me here, in spite of my prejudices. It is the discourses of Mrs. Stanton, of Mrs. Mott, of others that have spoken and written; and it is coming in contact with strong womanly mind. If we accept the convictions that come to us, we shall be all right; and I will do as the lady who has just spoken said that she would do—not be governed by mere party, but by the moral bearings of the questions that arise, and vote upon the side of God and justice. (Applause.)

FRANCES D. GAGE said: Mrs. President—It seems to be my fate to come in at the eleventh hour. We have been talking about the right to the ballot. Why do we want it? What does it confer? We closed our argument at three o'clock to-day by a discussion whether the women of this country and the colored men of this country wanted the ballot. I said it was a libel on woman to say she did not want it; and I repeat that assertion.... Last evening I attended the meeting of the National Temperance Association at Cooper Institute. A great audience was assembled there to listen to the arguments against the most gigantic evil that now pervades the American Republic. Men took the position that only a prohibitory law could put an end to the great evil of intemperance. New York has its two hundred millions of invested capital to sell death and destruction to the men of this country who are weak enough to purchase. There are eight thousand licensed liquor establishments in this city, to drag down humanity. It was asserted there by Wendell Phillips that intemperance had its root in our Saxon blood, that demanded a stimulus; and he argued from that standpoint. If intemperance has its root in the Saxon blood, that demands a stimulus, why is it that the womanhood of this nation is not at the grog-shops to-day? Are women not Saxons? It was asserted, both by Mr. Phillips and President Hopkins, of Union College, that the liquor traffic must be regulated by law. A man may do what he likes in his own house, said they; he may burn his furniture; he may take poison; he may light his cigar with his greenbacks; but if he carries his evil outside of his own house, if he increases my taxes, if he makes it dangerous for me or for my children to walk the streets, then it may be prohibited by law. I was at Harrisburgh, a few days ago, at the State Temperance Convention. Horace Greeley asserted that there was progress upon the subject of temperance; and he went back to the time when ardent spirits were drank in the household, when every table had its decanter, and the wife, children, and husband drank together. Now, said he, it is a rare thing to find the dram-bottle in the home. It has been put out. But what put the dram-bottle out of the home? It was put out because the education and refinement and power of woman became so strong in the home, that she said, "It must go out; we can't have it here." (Applause.) Then the voters of the United States, the white male citizens, went to work and licensed these nuisances that could not be in the home, at all the corners of the streets. I demand the ballot for woman to-day, that she may vote down these nuisances, the dram-shops, there also, as she drove them out of the home. (Applause.)

What privilege does the vote give to the "white male citizen" of the United States? Did you ever analyze a voter—hold him up and see what he was? Shall I give you a picture of him? Not as my friend Parker Pillsbury has drawn the picture to-night will I draw it. What is the "white male citizen"—the voter in the Republic of the United States? More than any potentate or any king in all Europe. Louis Napoleon dares not walk the streets of his own city without his body-guard around him with their bayonets. The Czar of Russia is afraid for his own life among his people. Kings and potentates are always afraid; but the "free white male citizen" of the United States, with the ballot in his hand, goes where he lists, does what he pleases. He owns himself, his earnings, his genius, his talent, his eloquence, his power, all there is of him. All that God has given him is his, to do with as he pleases, subject to no power but such laws as have an equal bearing upon every other man in like circumstances, and responsible to no power but his own conscience and his God. He builds colleges; he lifts up humanity or he casts it down. He is the lawgiver, the maker as it were of the nation. His single vote may turn the destiny of the whole Republic for good or ill. There is no link in the chain of human possibilities that can add one single power to the "white male citizen" of America.

Now we ask that you shall put into the hands of every human being this same power to go forward and do good works wherever it can. The country has rung within the last few days because one colored girl, with a little black blood in her veins, has been cast out of the Pittsburgh Methodist College. It ought to ring until such a thing shall be impossible. But when Cambridge and Yale and Union and all the other institutions of the country, West Point included, aided by national patronage, shut out every woman in the land, who has anything to say? There is not a single college instituted by the original government patronage of lands to public schools and colleges, that allows a woman to set her foot inside of its walls as a student. Is this no injustice? Is it no wrong? When men stand upon the public platform and deliver elaborate essays on women and their right of suffrage, they talk about their weakness, their devotion to fashion and idleness. What else have they given women to do? Almost every profession in the land is filled by men; every college sends forth the men to fill the highest places. When the law said that no married woman should do business in her own name, sue or be sued, own property, own herself or her earnings, what had she to do? That laid the foundation for precisely the state of things you see to-day. But I deny that, as a class, the women of America, black or white, are idle. We are always busy. What have we done? Look over this audience, go out upon your streets, go through the world where you will, and every human soul you meet is the work of woman. She has given it life; she has educated it, whether for good or evil, because God gave her the holiest mission ever laid upon the heart of a human soul—the mission of the mother.

We are told that home is woman's sphere. So it is, and man's sphere, too, for I tell you that that is a poor home which has not in it a man to feel that it is the most sacred place he knows. If duty requires him to go out into the world and fight its battles, who blames him, or puts a ban upon him? Men complain that woman does not love home now; that she is not satisfied with her mission. I answer that this discontent arises out of the one fact, that you have attempted to mould seventeen millions of human souls in one shape, and make them all do one thing. Take away your restrictions, open all doors, leave women at liberty to go where they will. The caged bird forgets how to build its nest. The wing of the eagle is as strong to soar to the sun as that of her mate, who never says to her, "back, feeble one, to your nest, and there brood in dull inactivity until I give you permission to leave!" But when her duties called her there, who ever found her unfaithful to her trust? The foot of the wild roe is as strong and swift in the race as that of her antlered companion. She goes by his side, she feeds in the same pasture, drinks from the same running brook, but is ever true also to her maternal duties and cares. If we are a nation of imbeciles, if womanhood is weak, it is the laws and customs of society which have made us what we are. If you want health, strength, energy, force, temperance, purity, honesty, deal justly with the mothers of this country: then they will give you nobler and stronger men than higgling politicians, or the grog-shop emissaries that buy up the votes of your manhood. It has been charged upon woman that she does nothing well. What have you given us to do well? What freedom have you given us to act independently and earnestly? When I was in San Domingo, I found a little colony of American colored people that went over there in 1825. They retained their American customs, and especially their little American church, outside of the Catholic, which overspread the whole country. In an obscure room in an old ruin they sung the old hymns, and lived the old life of the United States. I asked how this thing was, and they answered that among those that went over so long ago were a few from Chester County, Pennsylvania, who were brought up among the Quakers, and had learned to read. Wherever a mother had learned to read, she had educated all her children so that they could read; but wherever there was a mother that could not read, that family had lapsed off from the old customs of the past....

A friend of mine, writing from Charleston the other day, just after the ballot went down there, says that he was told by a colored man, "I met my old master, and he bowed so low to me I didn't hardly know which was the negro and which was the white man." When we hold the ballot, we shall stand just there. Men will forget to tell us that politics are degrading. They will bow low, and actually respect the women to whom they now talk platitudes, and silly flatteries; sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, ruby lips, the soft and delicate hands of refinement and beauty, will not be the burden of their song; but the strength, the power, the energy, the force, the intellect, and the nerve, which the womanhood of this country will bring to bear, and which will infuse itself through all the ranks of society, must make all its men and women wiser and better. [Applause].

The Association then adjourned until Friday morning, 10-1/2 o'clock.

SECOND DAY.

FRIDAY MORNING, May 10, 1867.

The meeting was called to order by the President, and the Secretary read some additional resolutions.[72]

CHARLES L. REMOND objected to the last of the resolution, and desired that the word "colored" might be stricken out. It might be that colored men would obtain their rights before women; but if so, he was confident they would heartily acquiesce in admitting women also to the right of suffrage.

The PRESIDENT (Mrs. Mott) said that woman had a right to be a little jealous of the addition of so large a number of men to the voting class, for the colored men would naturally throw all their strength upon the side of those opposed to woman's enfranchisement.

GEORGE T. DOWNING wished to know whether he had rightly understood that Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott were opposed to the enfranchisement of the colored man, unless the ballot should also be accorded to woman at the same time.

Mrs. STANTON said: All history proves that despotisms, whether of one man or millions, can not stand, and there is no use of wasting centuries of men and means in trying that experiment again. Hence I have no faith or interest in any reconstruction on that old basis. To say that politicians always do one thing at a time is no reason why philosophers should not enunciate the broad principles that underlie that one thing and a dozen others. We do not take the right step for this hour in demanding suffrage for any class; as a matter of principle I claim it for all. But in a narrow view of the question as a matter of feeling between classes, when Mr. Downing puts the question to me, are you willing to have the colored man enfranchised before the woman, I say, no; I would not trust him with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are. I desire that we go into the kingdom together, for individual and national safety demand that not another man be enfranchised without the woman by his side.

STEPHEN S. FOSTER, basing the demand for the ballot upon the natural right of the citizen, felt bound to aid in conferring it upon any citizen deprived of it irrespective of its being granted or denied to others. Even, therefore, if the enfranchisement of the colored man would probably retard the enfranchisement of woman, we had no right for that reason to deprive him of his right. The right of each should be accorded at the earliest possible moment, neither being denied for any supposed benefit to the other.

CHARLES L. REMOND said that if he were to lose sight of expediency, he must side with Mrs. Stanton, although to do so was extremely trying; for he could not conceive of a more unhappy position than that occupied by millions of American men bearing the name of freedmen while the rights and privileges free men are still denied them.

Mrs. STANTON said: That is equaled only by the condition of the women by their side. There is a depth of degradation known to the slave women that man can never feel. To give the ballot to the black man is no security to the woman. Saxon men have the ballot, yet look at their women, crowded into a few half-paid employments. Look at the starving, degraded class in our 10,000 dens of infamy and vice if you would know how wisely and generously man legislates for woman.

Rev. SAMUEL J. MAY, in reply to Mr. Remond's objection to the resolution, said that the word "colored" was necessary to convey the meaning, since there is no demand now made for the enfranchisement of men, as a class. His amendment would take all the color out of the resolution. No man in this country had made such sacrifices for the cause of liberty as Wendell Phillips; and if just at this moment, when the great question for which he has struggled thirty years seemed about to be settled, he was unwilling that anything should be added to it which might in any way prejudice the success about to crown his efforts, it was not to be wondered at. He was himself of the opinion, on the contrary, that by asking for the rights of all, we should be much more likely to obtain the rights of the colored man, than by making that a special question. He would rejoice at the enfranchisement of colored men, and believed that Mrs. Stanton would, though that were all we could get at the time. Yet, if we rest there, and allow the reconstruction to be completed, leaving out the better half of humanity, we must expect further trouble; and it might be a more awful and sanguinary civil war than that which we have just experienced.

GEORGE T. DOWNING desired that the Convention should express its opinion upon the point he had raised; and, therefore, offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That while we regret that the right sentiment, which would secure to women the ballot, is not as general as we would have it, nevertheless we wish it distinctly understood that we rejoice at the increasing sentiment which favors the enfranchisement of the colored man.

Mr. DOWNING understood Mrs. Stanton to refuse to rejoice at a part of the good results to be accomplished, if she could not achieve the whole, and he wished to ask if she was unwilling the colored man should have the vote until the women could have it also? He said we had no right to refuse an act of justice upon the assumption that it would be followed by an act of injustice.

Mrs. STANTON replied she demanded the ballot for all. She asked for reconstruction on the basis of self-government; but if we are to have further class legislation, she thought the wisest order of enfranchisement was to take the educated classes first. If women are still to be represented by men, then I say let only the highest type of manhood stand at the helm of State. But if all men are to vote, black and white, lettered and unlettered, washed and unwashed, the safety of the nation as well as the interests of woman demand that we outweigh this incoming tide of ignorance, poverty, and vice, with the virtue, wealth, and education of the women of the country. With the black man you have no new force in government—it is manhood still; but with the enfranchisement of woman, you have a new and essential element of life and power. Would Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, or Theodore Tilton be willing to stand aside and trust their individual interests, and the whole welfare of the nation, to the lowest strata of manhood? If not, why ask educated women, who love their country, who desire to mould its institutions on the highest idea of justice and equality, who feel that their enfranchisement is of vital importance to this end, why ask them to stand aside while 2,000,000 ignorant men are ushered into the halls of legislation?

EDWARD M. DAVIS asked what had been done with Mr. Burleigh's amendment.

The CHAIR—No action was taken upon it, as no one seconded it.

ABBY KELLY FOSTER said: I am in New York for medical treatment, not for speech-making; yet I must say a few words in relation to a remark recently made on this platform—that "The negro should not enter the kingdom of politics before woman, because he would be an additional weight against her enfranchisement." Were the negro and woman in the same civil, social, and religious status to-day, I should respond aye, with all my heart, to this sentiment. What are the facts? You say the negro has the civil rights bill, also the military reconstruction bill granting him suffrage. It has been well said, "he has the title deed to liberty, but is not yet in the possession of liberty." He is treated as a slave to-day in the several districts of the South. Without wages, without family rights, whipped and beaten by thousands, given up to the most horrible outrages, without that protection which his value as property formerly gave him. Again, he is liable without farther guarantees, to be plunged into peonage, serfdom or even into chattel slavery. Have we any true sense of justice, are we not dead to the sentiment of humanity if we shall wish to postpone his security against present woes and future enslavement till woman shall obtain political rights?

Rev. HENRY WARD BEECHER said: It seems that my modesty in not lending my name has been a matter of some grief. I will try hereafter to be less modest. When I get my growth I hope to overcome that. I certainly should not have been present to-day, except that a friend said to me that some who were expected had not come. When a cause is well launched and is prospering, I never feel specially called to help it. When a cause that I believe to be just is in the minority, and is struggling for a hearing, then I should always be glad to be counted among those who were laboring for it in the days when it lacked friends. I come to bear testimony, not as if I had not already done it, but again, as confirmed by all that I have read, whether of things written in England or spoken in America, in the belief that this movement is not the mere progeny of a fitful and feverish ism—that it is not a mere frothing eddy whose spirit is but the chafing of the water upon the rock—but that it is a part of that great tide which follows the drawing of heaven itself. I believe it to be so. I trust that it will not be invidious if I say, therefore, I hope the friends of this cause will not fall out by the way. If the division of opinion amounts merely to this, that you have two blades, and therefore can cut, I have no objection to it; but if there is such a division of opinion in respect to mere details, how important those details are, among friends that are one at the bottom where principles are, that there is to be a falling out there, I shall exceedingly regret it; I shall regret that our strength is weakened, when we need it to be augmented most, or concentrated.

All my lifetime the great trouble has been that in merely speculative things theologians have been such furious logicians, have picked up their premises, and rushed with them with race-horse speed to such remote conclusions, that in the region of ideas our logical minds have become accustomed to draw results as remote as the very eternities from any premises given. My difficulty on the other hand, has been that in practical matters, owing to the existence of this great mephitic swamp of slavery, men have been utterly unwilling to draw conclusions at all; and that the most familiar principles of political economy or politics have been enunciated, and then always docked off short. Men would not allow them to go to their natural results, in the class of questions in society. We have had raised up before us the necessity of maintaining the Union by denying conclusions. The most dear and sacred and animating principles of religion have been restrained, because they would have such a bearing upon slavery, and men felt bound to hold their peace. Our most profound and broadly acknowledged principles of liberty have been enunciated and passed over, without carrying them out and applying them to society, because it would interrupt the peace of the nation. That time is passed away; and as the result of it has come in a joy and a perfect appetite on the part of the public.

I have been a careful observer for more than thirty-five years, for I came into public life, I believe, about the same time with the lady who has just sat down (Mrs. Foster), although I am not so much worn by my labors as she seems to have been. For thirty-five years I have observed in society its impetus checked, and a kind of lethargy and deadness in practical ethics, arising from fear of this prejudicial effect upon public economy. I have noticed that in the last five years there has been a revolution as perfect as if it had been God's resurrection in the graveyard. The dead men are living, and the live men are thrice alive. I can scarcely express my sense of the leap the public mind and the public moral sense have taken within this time. The barrier is out of the way. That which made the American mind untrue logically to itself is smitten down by the hand of God; and there is just at this time an immense tendency in the public mind to carry out all principles to their legitimate conclusions, go where they will. There never was a time when men were so practical, and so ready to learn. I am not a farmer, but I know that the spring comes but once in the year. When the furrow is open is the time to put in your seed, if you would gather a harvest in its season. Now, when the red-hot plowshare of war has opened a furrow in this nation, is the time to put in the seed. If any man says to me, "Why will you agitate the woman's question, when it is the hour for the black man?" I answer, it is the hour for every man, black or white. (Applause.) The bees go out in the morning to gather the honey from the morning-glories. They take it when they are open, for by ten o'clock they are shut, and they never open again until the next crop comes. When the public mind is open, if you have anything to say, say it. If you have any radical principles to urge, any organizing wisdom to make known, don't wait until quiet times come. Don't wait until the public mind shuts up altogether.

War has opened the way for impulse to extend itself. But progress goes by periods, by jumps and spurts. We are in the favored hour; and if you have great principles to make known, this is the time to advance those principles. If you can organize them into institutions, this is the time to organize them. I therefore say, whatever truth is to be known for the next fifty years in this nation let it be spoken now—let it be enforced now. The truth that I have to urge is not that women have the right of suffrage—not that Chinamen or Irishmen have the right of suffrage—not that native born Yankees have the right of suffrage—but that suffrage is the inherent right of mankind. I say that man has the right of suffrage as I say that man has the right to himself. For although it may not be true under the Russian government, where the government does not rest on the people, and although under our own government a man has not a right to himself, except in accordance with the spirit and action of our own institutions, yet our institutions make the government depend on the people, and make the people depend on the government; and no man is a full citizen, or fully competent to take care of himself, or to defend himself, who has not all those rights that belong to his fellows. I therefore advocate no sectional rights, no class rights, no sex rights, but the most universal form of right for all that live and breathe on the continent. I do not put back the black man's emancipation; nor do I put back for a single day or for an hour his admission. I ask not that he should wait. I demand that this work shall be done, not upon the ground that it is politically expedient now to enfranchise black men; but I propose that you take expediency out of the way, and that you put a principle that is more enduring than expediency in the place of it—manhood and womanhood suffrage for all. That is the question. You may just as well meet it now as at any other time. You never will have so favorable an occasion, so sympathetic a heart, never a public reason so willing to be convinced as to-day. If anything is to be done for the black man, or the black woman, or for the disfranchised classes among the whites, let it be done, in the name of God, while his Providence says, "Come; come all, and come welcome."

But I take wisdom from some with whom I have not always trained. If you would get ten steps, has been the practical philosophy of some who are not here to-day, demand twenty, and then you will get ten. Now, even if I were to confine—as I by no means do—my expectation to gaining the vote for the black man, I think we should be much more likely to gain that by demanding the vote for everybody. I remember that when I was a boy Dr. Spurzheim came to this country to advocate phrenology, but everybody held up both hands—"Phrenology! You must be running mad to have the idea that phrenology can be true!" It was not long after that, mesmerism came along; and then the people said, "Mesmerism! We can go phrenology; there is some sense in that; but as for mesmerism—!" Very soon spiritualism made its appearance, and then the same people began to say, "Spiritualism! Why it is nothing but mesmerism; we can believe in that; but as for spiritualism—!" (Laughter.) The way to get a man to take a position is to take one in advance of it, and then he will drop into the one you want him to take. So that if, being crafty, I desire to catch men with guile, and desire them to adopt suffrage for colored men, as good a trap as I know of is to claim it for women also. Bait your trap with the white woman, and I think you will catch the black man. (Laughter.) I would not, certainly, have it understood that we are standing here to advocate this universal application of the principle merely to secure the enfranchisement of the colored citizen. We do it in good faith. I believe it is just as easy to carry the enfranchisement of all as the enfranchisement of any class, and easier to carry it than carry the enfranchisement of class after class—class after class. (Applause.)

I make this demand because I have the deepest sense of what is before us. We have entered upon an era such as never before has come to any nation. We are at a point in the history of the world where we need a prophet, and have none to describe to us those events rising in the horizon thick and fast. Sometimes it seems to me that that Latter Day glory which the prophets dimly saw, and which saints have ever since, with faintness of heart, longed for and prayed for with wavering faith, is just before us. I see the fountains of the great deep broken up. I think we are to have a nation born in a day among us, greater in power of thought, greater in power of conscience, greater therefore in self-government, greater still in the power of material development. Such thrift, such skill, such enterprise, such power of self-sustentation I think is about to be developed, to say nothing of the advance already made before the nations, as will surprise even the most sanguine and far-sighted. Nevertheless, while so much is promised, there are all the attendant evils. It is a serious thing to bring unwashed, uncombed, untutored men, scarcely redeemed from savagery, to the ballot-box. It is a dangerous thing to bring the foreigner, whose whole secular education was under the throne of the tyrant, and put his hand upon the helm of affairs in this free nation. It is a dangerous thing to bring men without property, or the expectation of it, into the legislative halls to legislate upon property. It is a dangerous thing to bring woman, unaccustomed to and undrilled in the art of government, suddenly into the field to vote. These are dangerous things; I admit it. But I think God says to us, "By that danger I put every man of you under the solemn responsibility of preparing these persons effectually for their citizenship." Are you a rich man, afraid of your money? By that fear you are called to educate the men who you are afraid will vote against you. We are in a time of danger. I say to the top of society, just as sure as you despise the bottom, you shall be left like the oak tree that rebelled against its own roots—better that it be struck with lightning. Take a man from the top of society or the bottom, and if you will but give himself to himself, give him his reason, his moral nature, and his affections; take him with all his passions and his appetites, and develop him, and you will find he has the same instinct for self-government that you have. God made a man just as much to govern himself as a pyramid to stand on its own bottom. Self-government is a boon intended for all. This is shown in the very organization of the human mind, with its counterbalances and checks.... We are underpinning and undergirding society. Let us put under it no political expediency, but the great principle of manhood and womanhood, not merely cheating ourselves by a partial measure, but carrying the nation forward to its great and illustrious future, in which it will enjoy more safety, more dignity, more sublime proportions, and a health that will know no death. (Applause.)

HENRY C. WRIGHT said that circumstances had made Wendell Phillips and others, leaders in the Anti-Slavery movement, as they had made Mrs. Stanton and others leaders in this; and while they all desired the enfranchisement of both classes, it was no more than right that each should devote his energies to his own movement. There need not be, and should not be any antagonism between the two.

Miss ANTHONY said—The question is not, is this or that person right, but what are the principles under discussion. As I understand the difference between Abolitionists, some think this is harvest time for the black man, and seed-sowing time for woman. Others, with whom I agree, think we have been sowing the seed of individual rights, the foundation idea of a republic for the last century, and that this is the harvest time for all citizens who pay taxes, obey the laws and are loyal to the government. (Applause.)

Mr. REMOND said: In an hour like this I repudiate the idea of expediency. All I ask for myself I claim for my wife and sister. Let our action be based upon the rock of everlasting principle. No class of citizens in this country can be deprived of the ballot without injuring every other class. I see how equality of suffrage in the State of New York is necessary to maintain emancipation in South Carolina. Do not moral principles, like water, seek a common level? Slavery in the Southern States crushed the right of free speech in Massachusetts and made slaves of Saxon men and women, just as the $250 qualification in the Constitution of this State degrades and enslaves black men all over the Union.

Mr. PILLSBURY protested against the use of the few last moments of this meeting in these discussions. We should be now only "a committee of ways and means," and future work should be the business in hand. Mr. Downing presented an unnecessary issue. Government will never ask us which should enter into citizenship first, the woman or the colored man, or whether we prefer one to the other. Indeed government has given the colored man the ballot already. We are demanding suffrage equally, not unequally. Mrs. Stanton's private opinion, be it what it may, has nothing to do with the general question. The white voters are mostly opposed to woman's suffrage. So will the colored men be, probably; at least so she believes, as Mrs. Mott also suggested very strongly, and a million or more of them added to the present opposition and indifference, are not a slight consideration. Mrs. Stanton does not believe in loving her neighbor better than herself. Justice to one class does not mean injustice to another. Woman has as good a right to the ballot as the black man—no better. Were I a colored man, and had reason to believe that should woman obtain her rights she would use them to the prejudice of mine, how could I labor very zealously in her behalf? It should be enough for Mr. Downing and all who stand with him that Mrs. Stanton does not demand one thing for herself as to rights, or time of obtaining them, which she does not cheerfully, earnestly demand for all others, regardless of color or sex.