Says I, “Horace can you look me straight in the spectacles and deny that there is wimmen’s influence in politics at Washington to-day?” Says I, “look at them female lobsteresses there.” Says I, “one handsome, brilliant, unprincipled bad woman will influence 14 common men where a modest humbly well wisher of her sect will one.” And says I, warmly, for the thought of these female lobsteresses always madded me—“I should be ashamed if I was in some of them Senators’ places, makin’ laws about the Mormans.”
I see my deep principle was a floatin’ me off into a subject where as a female I didn’t want to go, and so I choked back the words I was about to utter which was, “I had jest as lives jine a Morman, as to jine one of them.” I choked it back, and struggled for calmness, for I was excited. But I did say this,
“I think good wimmen ought to have a chance with bad ones in political affairs. For there is more good wimmen in the land than there is bad ones, but now the bad ones have it all thier own way.”
Horace wiped his brow gently with his lead pencil, and said in a thoughtful accent,
“There may be some truth in what you say Josiah Allen’s wife. I confess I never looked at it in exactly this light before.”
Says I, in a triumphant glad tone, “That is jest what I told Josiah.” Says I, “Josiah, Horace is all right, there never was a better meanin’ man on the face of the earth than Horace is. All he wants is to have some noble principled woman to set him right in this one thing.”
I see in a minute that I had made a mistake. Men hate to be dictated to by a woman, they hate to, like a dog. I see by his lowery brow that I had put the wrong foot forrerd. For the time bein’ the sage and the philosifer sunk down in his nature, and the man spoke in the usual manlike way.
“I say wimmen’s brains are too weak to grasp public matters. They have remarkable intuitions I grant. A woman’s insight or instinct or whatever you may term it, will, I grant, fly over a mountain and discover what is on the other side of it, while a man is gettin’ his gunpowder ready to make a tunnel through it. But they are not logical, they have not the firm grasp of mind, the clear comprehension requisite to a voter.”
Says I, “Horace, which has the firmest grasp—the clearest comprehension, a earnest intellegent christian woman, or a drunken Irishman?” Says I, “Understand me Horace, I don’t ask which would sell thier votes at the best lay, or vote the most times in one day—I dare say the man would get ahead of the woman in these respects, bein’ naturally more of a speculator—and also bein’ in practice. You know practice makes perfect. I don’t ask you this. But I ask you and I want you to answer me Horace, which would be in the best condition for votin’, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gettin’ up off of her religious knees in the mornin’ after family prayers, and walkin’—with the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other—coolly and sensibly to the pole, or Patrick oh Flanegan comin’ out of a drunken wake, and staggerin’ up against the pole with a whisky bottle in one hand and a club in the other, when he didn’t know nothin’ in the first place, and then had lost half or 3 quarters of that, in the liquer some clear minded, logical man give him, for votin’ a few dozen times for him?”