There will always be many women, as there are many men, who are indifferent to voting. For a time, perhaps always, there will be a larger percentage of this indifference among women. But the natural right to a share in the government under which one lives, and to a voice in making the laws under which one may be hanged,—this belongs to each woman as an individual; and she is quite right to claim it as she needs it, even though the majority of her sex still prefer to take their chance of the penalty, without perplexing themselves about the law. The demand of every enlightened woman who asks for the ballot—like the demand of every enlightened slave for freedom—is an individual demand; and the question whether they represent the majority of their class has nothing to do with it. For a republic like ours does not profess to deal with classes, but with individuals; since "the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, for the common good," as the constitution of Massachusetts says.

And, fortunately, there is such power in an individual demand that it appeals to thousands whom no abstract right touches. Five minutes with Frederick Douglass settled the question, for any thoughtful person, of that man's right to freedom. Let any woman of position desire to enter what is called "the lecture-field," to support herself and her children, and at once all abstract objections to women's speaking in public disappear: her friends may be never so hostile to "the cause," but they espouse her individual cause; the most conservative clergyman subscribes for tickets, but begs that his name may not be mentioned. They do not admit that women, as a class, should speak,—not they; but for this individual woman they throng the hall. Mrs. Dahlgren abhors politics: a woman in Congress, a woman in the committee-room,—what can be more objectionable? But I observe that when Mrs. Dahlgren wishes to obtain more profit by her husband's inventions all objections vanish: she can appeal to Congressmen, she can address committees, she can, I hope, prevail. The individual ranks first in our sympathy: we do not wait to take the census of the "class." Make way for the individual, whether it be Mrs. Dahlgren pleading for the rights of property, or Lucy Stone pleading for the rights of the mother to her child.



DEFEATS BEFORE VICTORIES

After one of the early defeats in the War of the Rebellion, the commander of a Massachusetts regiment wrote home to his father: "I wish people would not write us so many letters of condolence. Our defeat seemed to trouble them much more than it troubles us. Did people suppose there were to be no ups and downs? We expect to lose plenty of battles, but we have enlisted for the war."

It is just so with every successful reform. While enemies and half-friends are proclaiming its defeats, those who advocate it are rejoicing that they have at last got an army into the field to be defeated. Unless this war is to be an exception to all others, even the fact of having joined battle is a great deal. It is the first step. Defeat first; a good many defeats, if you please: victory by and by.

William Wilberforce, writing to a friend in the year 1817, said, "I continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward by Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority of the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so far from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a recommendation." In 1832 the reform bill was passed.

In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave trade, Colonel Tarleton, who boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to Wilberforce and others, said, "The inspiration began on that side of the house;" then turning round, "The revolution has reached to this also, and reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy." The first vote in the House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163: majority against the measure, 75. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished, and in 1834 slavery in the British colonies followed; and even on the very night when the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by Gladstone, the great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty years and done nothing. The Roman Catholic relief bill, establishing freedom of thought in England, had the same experience. It passed in 1829 by a majority of a hundred and three in the House of Lords, which had nine months before refused by a majority of forty-five to take up the question at all.

The English corn laws went down a quarter of a century ago, after a similar career of failures. In 1840 there were hundreds of thousands in England who thought that to attack the corn laws was to attack the very foundations of society. Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, said in Parliament, that "he had heard of many mad things in his life, but, before God, the idea of repealing the corn laws was the very maddest thing of which he had ever heard." Lord John Russell counselled the House to refuse to hear evidence on the operation of the corn laws. Six years after, in 1846, they were abolished forever.

How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,—and to quote how Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that slavery should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who discussed it should be imprisoned,—while, in spite of them all, the great reform was moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing politicians and people to talk, like Sterne's starling, nothing but slavery!

We who were trained in the light of these great agitations have learned their lesson. We expect to march through a series of defeats to victory. The first thing is, as in the anti-slavery movement, so to arouse the public mind as to make this the central question. Given this prominence, and it is enough for this year or for many years to come. Wellington said that there was no such tragedy as a victory, except a defeat. On the other hand, the next best thing to a victory is a defeat, for it shows that the armies are in the field. Without the unsuccessful attempt of to-day, no success to-morrow.

When Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble came to this country, she was amazed to find Americans celebrating the battle of Bunker Hill, which she had always heard claimed as a victory for King George. Such it was doubtless called; but what we celebrated was the fact that the Americans there threw up breastworks, stood their ground, fired away their ammunition,—and were defeated. Thus the reformer, too, looking at his failures, often sees in them such a step forward, that they are the Bunker Hill of a new revolution. Give us plenty of such defeats, and we can afford to wait a score of years for the victories. They will come.



INDEX

Acidalius, Valens Adams, J.Q. Adams, Mrs. John Addison, Joseph Adelung, J.C. Agassiz, Alexander Agrippa, Cornelius Alabaster, Henry Alcott, Louisa Alderson, Baron Amalasontha, Queen Anne, Queen Antisthenes Aponte, Emanuele Arblay, Madame d' Aristotle Ashburton, Lady

Bacon, Francis Bagehot, Walter Barry, J.S. Barton, Clara Beaujour, L.F. de Beecher, H.W. Behn, Mrs. Aphra Bennett, Mr. Beyle, Henri (Stendhal) Blackburn, Henry Blackstone, William Blind, Karl Bolingbroke, H.S. Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonheur, Rosa Boswell, James Boufflet, Margaret Brigitta, Saint Brooks, Phillips Brougham, Lord Brown, John Browne, C.F. (Artemus Ward) Browning, Elizabeth B. Browning, Robert Buchan, Countess of Buckle, H.T. Buffon, Count de Bulan, Madame Burke, Edmund Burleigh, Lord Butler, Samuel Byron, Lord

Caesar, Julius Calhoun, J.C. Cameron, Dr. Canning, George, Catherine II., Empress Channing, W.E. Chapman, Chief Justice Charlemagne Chatham, Earl of Chaucer, Geoffrey Chesterfield, Earl of Child, Lydia M. Choate, Rufus Choisi, Abbe Christina of Sweden Christlieb, Professor Churchill, Charles Clarendon, Earl of Clarke, E.H. Clay, Henry Coleridge, Justice Comer, Mr. Comte, Auguste Confucius Copley, J.S. Cornaro, Elena Cowper, William Crocker, Mrs. H. (Mather) Cromwell, Oliver Currie, James Curzon, George

Dacier, Madame Dahlgren, Mrs. M.V. Dall, Mrs. Caroline A. Dana, Mr. Dante degli Alighieri Darling, Grace Darwin, Charles Davy, Sir Humphry Demosthenes Dickens, Charles Dickinson, Anna Dinser, George Dinser, Lena Dix, Dorothea Dobell, Sidney Domenichi, Ludovico Douglass, Frederick Drake, Sir Francis Dryden, John Dudevant, Madame (George Sand) Dufour, Madame Gacon

Eastman, Mary F. Edgeworth, Maria Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth of Russia Elstob, Elizabeth Emerson, R.W. Everett, Edward

Fenelon, Francis de S. de la M. Fern, Fanny. See Parton. Flammer, Justice Fontanges, Duchesse de Fonte, Moderata Fox, C.J. Franklin, Benjamin Frederick II. Frederick, Prince Frith, W.P. Froissart, John Froude J.A. Fuller, Thomas

Garrick, David Garrison, W.L. Genlis, Mme. de Gibbon, Edward Gibson, Anthony Gladstone, W.E. Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Goethe, J.W. von Goguet, A.Y. Goldsmith, Oliver Goodwin, W.W. Grant, U.S. Grattan, Henry Greenwood, Grace. See Lippincott Griswold, R.W. Guillaume, Jacquette Guion, Madame

Hale, E.E. Hallock, Peter Hamilton, Gail Harland, Marion Harte, F.B. Hauey, R.J. Hawthorne, Nathaniel Herbert, Sidney Hesiod Heyrick, Elizabeth Hoar, G.F. Hogarth, William Homer Hopkins, Mark Howard, John Howe, Mrs. Julia W. Howe, W.F. Howland, Rachel Humboldt, F.H.A. von Hume, David Huxley, T.H. Hyacinthe, Pere

James I., King Jameson, Mrs. Anna Jefferson, Thomas Joan of Arc Johnson, Andrew Johnson, Samuel Jones, C.C. Jonson, Ben

Kean, Edmund Kemble, Frances A. Kemble, John Kent, James

Lagrange, Madame Lamb, Charles Launay, Mlle. de Lawrence, W.B. Layard, Sir A.H. Leland, C.G. Leonowens, Mrs. Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany Lessing, G.E. Lewes, Mrs. (George Eliot) Libussa Lincoln, Abraham Lippincott, Mrs. S.J. (Grace Greenwood) Liszt, Abbe Livermore, Mary Livingstone, David Locke, John Lockhart, J.G. Louise of Savoy Lowe. See Sherbrooke Lowell, J.R. Lowery, Captain Lubbock, Sir John Lucretia

Macaulay, T.B. Magann, William Mahaffy, J.P. Maintenon, Madame de Malibran, Madame Marechal, Sylvain Margaret of Austria Marguerite of Navarre Maria Theresa, Empress Marmella, Lucrezia Marlborough, Duke of Martineau, Harriet Mazarm, Julius Melbourne, Lord Mill, J S. Mohammed Moliere, J.B.P. de Monk, George Montpensier, Mlle. de Moore, Thomas Mott, Lucretia Muloch, D.M.

Napoleon, Louis Nelson, Horatio Newton, Sir Isaac Niebuhr, Carsten Nightingale, Florence Nogarola, Isotta Norton, Hon. Mrs. Caroline

Ormond, James Butler, Duke of Ossoli, Margaret (Fuller) Otis, James Ovid

Parker, Theodore Parkman, Francis Parsons, Theophilus Parton, Mrs. (Fanny Fern) Patten, Mrs. Paul, Jean See Richter Peabody, F.G. Pembroke, Earl of Pepys, Samuel Pericles Peterborough, Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Petersdorff Petrarch Philip II, King Phillipps, Adelaide Phillips, Wendell Pitt, William Plato, Plummer, Miss Pompadour, Mme. Pope, Alexander Porson, Richard Pythagoras

Quincy, Edmund Quincy, Josiah

Ramsay, Allan Reade, Charles Ream, Vinme Remond, Charles Reynolds, Sir Joshua Richelieu, Armand J. Duplessis, Cardinal Richter, J.P.F. Robert the Bruce Robin, Abbe Robinson, W.S. (Warrington) Rochambeau, General Rogers, Samuel Roland, Madame Romilly, Sir Samuel Rossi, Properzia de Russell, Lord John

Safford, T.H. Saint Augustine Saintouges, Francoise de Sand George. See Dudevant Sappho Schiller, J.C.F. von Schurman, Anna Maria Scott, Sir Walter Shakespeare, William Sheppard, Jack Sherbrooke, Lord (Robert Lowe) Sheridan, P.H. Sherman W.T. Sidney, Sir Philip Smith, Goldwin Socrates Somerville, Mrs. Mary Southworth, E.D E.N. Sparks, Jared Spenser Edmund Stael, Madame de Stendhal See Beyle. Stephen, Fitzjames Sterne, Laurence Stevens, Mrs. Paran Stone, Lucy Story, W.W. Stove, Harriet (Beecher) Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Sumner, Charles Swift, Jonathan

Taine, H.A. Tambroni, Clotilda Tarleton, Colonel Ten Broeck Tennyson, Alfred Thackeray, W.P. Thoreau, H.D. Thou, J.A. De Timon of Athens Tocqueville, Alexis de Trench, Mrs. Richard

Varro, M.T. Victoria, Queen Volney, C.F. Chasseboeuf, Count de Voltaire, F.M.A. de

Wallace, A.R. Walpole, Horace Walworth, M.T. Ward, Artemus. See Browne, C.F. Warrington. See Robinson. Washington, George Webster, Daniel, Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, Westbrook, Judge Whipple, E.P. Whittier, J.G. Wieland, C.M. Wilberforce, William Winkelried, Arnold Withington, Leonard Wlasla Wollstonecraft, Mary. See Godwin. Woodbury, Augustus Wordsworth, William

THE END