The mock-marriage, by which the woman's entailed suffrage served a fraudulent purpose; the abbesses called to Parliament in right of abbey-lands, the permission accorded to the eighty-one women of Upsal, the position of the French "Dames de la Halle," the female stockholders in the East-India Company, that one persistent female property-holder in Nova Scotia, the fifty-dollar proclamation-money in New Jersey,—all indicate that there never has been, and never will be, any serious difficulty about woman's voting in any age or any country where the right to vote depends upon the possession of property, and where she herself professes to desire it.
Understand, then, that the abstract right to vote is not the question for you to consider: that was settled some hundreds of years ago.
The practical question for American men to put to themselves is, whether their own democratic experiment is a failure. Will you go back to the property basis for your own franchise? or do you still profess to believe, that man—as man, as child of God—has a right to reign, which does not depend upon broad doubloons or broad acres? And, if man has this right upon a simple human ground, how can you deny it to woman?
Will you say that she is not human,—that she has no soul?
Even Mahomet did better than that. Some one once asked him if the marriage-tie were immortal, and if a husband might claim his wife in the next world:—
"If the man be the superior being," he replied, "he can claim his wife or not, as he chooses; but, if the woman be the superior, the decision must rest with her."
And what Mahomet thus prophesied of the world to come is clearly true of the world that is. There is no such thing as cheating either God or humanity.
Let him who aspires to rule make himself superior in understanding and moral purpose, and he will rule.
No possibilities, visible or invisible, need daunt him; but, let him be false by one hair's breadth, and he carries his doom in his own bosom as certainly as the flawed crystal at the approach of frost.