The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Origin of the Movement (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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СКАЧАТЬ resolute will; they have not been able to answer all the calls made upon their time and talent. One of them (I can speak but for one) between the 11th of November and the 31st of January, has given sixty-eight lectures, not missing one appointment, resting only through the holidays and on Sundays. The others have doubtless done as well. In most instances all have been able to pay their own expenses, and in some cases their own salaries.

      These ladies are not disappointed old maids, desolate widows, or unhappy wives, though there is one widow and one who has passed what is called the sunny side of twenty-five. Miss Susan B. Anthony, the general agent, resides at Rochester, and is unmarried. Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, of New York City, is too widely known to need comment. The same may be said of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the eloquent minister, accomplished scholar, and amiable wife and mother. Mrs. J. Elizabeth Jones, of Ohio, is a lady in the ripeness of womanhood, to whom, equally with the above, all these adjectives apply. Mrs. Hannah Tracy Cutler, of Illinois, has been twice married, and has superintended two families of children satisfactorily; she has been teacher in a high school in Columbus, Ohio, and matron of a deaf and dumb asylum, has taken premiums on sorghum sugar made by her own hands, and is also a physician among the poor of her neighborhood. Mrs. Lucy N. Colman, of New York, is a widow, and has fought life's battle bravely and well for herself and children. Mrs. Frances D. Gage, of Missouri, formerly of Ohio, might claim the nomination for President under the authority of Henry Ward Beecher, "having brought up six unruly boys," whose aggregate height would form a column of thirty-six feet in honor of their mother, who will all vote the Republican ticket in 1860 but one, and he is not old enough; and no one of them smokes or chews, or stimulates the inner man with intoxicating beverages. She is also the mother of two daughters.

      Two years ago Mr. Greeley said to one of the ladies, "Why don't you ladies go to work?" They have gone to work; and with the help of such men as Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Giddings, Curtis, Beecher, Chapin, Brady, and a host of others whom the world delights to honor, their cause will surely triumph. It is a question of time only; not of fact. God speed the day.

      The State Convention of 1860 was held in Association Hall, Albany, February 3d and 4th, with fine audiences throughout, and the usual force of speakers. As the outpourings of Miss Anthony's love element all flowed into the suffrage movement, she was sorely tried with the imperative cares that the domestic experiments of most of her coadjutors so constantly involved. Her urgent missives coming ever and anon to arouse us to higher duties, are quite inspiring even at this date. In a letter to Martha C. Wright, she says:

      Mr. Bingham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will bring in a radical report in favor of all our claims, but previous to his doing so he wishes our strongest arguments made before the Committee, and he says Mrs. Stanton must come. I write her this mail, but I wish you would step over there and make her feel that the salvation of the Empire State, at least the women in it, depends upon her bending all her powers to moving the hearts of our law-makers at this time. Mr. Bingham says our Convention here has wrought wondrous changes with a large number of the members who attended, and so says Mr. Mayo, of the Albanians; indeed our claims are so patent they need only to be known to be approved. Mrs. Stanton must move heaven and earth now to secure this bill, and she can, if she will only try. I should go there myself this very night, but I must watch and encourage friends here. The Earnings Bill has passed the House, and is in Committee of the Whole in the Senate. Then a Guardianship Bill must be drafted and put through if possible. I returned from New York last evening; have taken the "Cooper Union," for our National Convention in May. Saw Miss Howland; she said Mr. Beecher's lecture is to be in this week's Independent. Only think how many priestly eyes will be compelled to look at its defiled page. Theodore Tilton told me that Mr. Beecher had had a severe battle to get into The Independent.

      Mrs. Stanton, in answering Miss Anthony's appeal, says:

      I am willing to do the appointed work at Albany. If Napoleon says cross the Alps, they are crossed. I can not, my dear friend, "move heaven and earth," but I will do what I can with pen and brain. You must come here and start me on the right train of thought, as your practical knowledge of just what is wanted is everything in getting up the right document. Kind regards to the anti-slavery host now with you. I did not think that the easy arm-chair I occupied on the Auburn platform was to bring me so much glory. Did you know the resolutions of that meeting were read on the floor of Congress?—that pleased me greatly. I am very proud to stand maternal sponsor for the whole string. I wish our Albany resolutions had more snap in them. The Garrison clique are the only men in this nation that know how to write a resolution.

      On the 18th of February Mrs. Stanton addressed the Legislature on woman's right of suffrage and the bill then pending in the Senate. A magnificent audience greeted her in the Capitol. She occupied the Speaker's desk, and was introduced by Senator Hammond, and spoke as follows:

      Gentlemen of the Judiciary:—There are certain natural rights as inalienable to civilization as are the rights of air and motion to the savage in the wilderness. The natural rights of the civilized man and woman are government, property, the harmonious development of all their powers, and the gratification of their desires. There are a few people we now and then meet who, like Jeremy Bentham, scout the idea of natural rights in civilization, and pronounce them mere metaphors, declaring that there are no rights aside from those the law confers. If the law made man too, that might do, for then he could be made to order to fit the particular niche he was designed to fill. But inasmuch as God made man in His own image, with capacities and powers as boundless as the universe, whose exigencies no mere human law can meet, it is evident that the man must ever stand first; the law but the creature of his wants; the law giver but the mouthpiece of humanity. If, then, the nature of a being decides its rights, every individual comes into this world with rights that are not transferable. He does not bring them like a pack on his back, that may be stolen from him, but they are a component part of himself, the laws which insure his growth and development. The individual may be put in the stocks, body and soul, he may be dwarfed, crippled, killed, but his rights no man can get; they live and die with him.

      Though the atmosphere is forty miles deep all round the globe, no man can do more than fill his own lungs. No man can see, hear, or smell but just so far; and though hundreds are deprived of these senses, his are not the more acute. Though rights have been abundantly supplied by the good Father, no man can appropriate to himself those that belong to another. A citizen can have but one vote, fill but one office, though thousands are not permitted to do either. These axioms prove that woman's poverty does not add to man's wealth, and if, in the plenitude of his power, he should secure to her the exercise of all her God-given rights, her wealth could not bring poverty to him. There is a kind of nervous unrest always manifested by those in power, whenever new claims are started by those out of their own immediate class. The philosophy of this is very plain. They imagine that if the rights of this new class be granted, they must, of necessity, sacrifice something of what they already possess. They can not divest themselves of the idea that rights are very much like lands, stocks, bonds, and mortgages, and that if every new claimant be satisfied, the supply of human rights must in time run low. You might as well carp at the birth of every child, lest there should not be enough air left to inflate your lungs; at the success of every scholar, for fear that your draughts at the fountain of knowledge could not be so long and deep; at the glory of every hero, lest there be no glory left for you....

      If the object of government is to protect the weak against the strong, how unwise to place the power wholly in the hands of the strong. Yet that is the history of all governments, even the model republic of these United States. You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another? Any of you can readily see the defects in other governments, and pronounce sentence against those who have sacrificed the masses to themselves; but when we come to our own case, we are blinded by custom and self-interest. Some of you who have no capital can see the injustice which the laborer suffers; some of you who have no slaves, can see the cruelty of his oppression; but who of you appreciate the galling humiliation, the refinements of degradation, to which women (the mothers, wives, СКАЧАТЬ