grievances to redress, and, therefore, the same necessity for the
exercise of this great fundamental right, of all human beings in free
society. For the right to vote is the great primitive right. It is the
right in which all freedom originates and culminates. It is the right
from which all others spring, in which they merge, and without which
they fall whenever assailed.

This right makes, and is all the difference between government by and
with the consent of the governed and government without and against
the consent of the governed; and that is the difference between
freedom and slavery. If the right to vote be not that difference, what
is? No, sir. If either sex as a class can dispense with the right to
vote, then take it from the strong, and no longer rob the weak of
their defense for the benefit of the strong.

But it is impossible to conceive of the suffrage as a right dependent
at all upon such an irrelevant condition as sex. It is an individual,
a personal right. It may be withheld by force; but if withheld by
reason of sex it is a moral robbery.

But it is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the
performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not
claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to
vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise this high
function in the state because of motherhood. On the contrary, if any
woman has a motive more than another person, man or woman, to secure
the enactment and enforcement of good laws, it is the mother, who,
beside her own life, person, and property, to the protection of which
the ballot is as essential as to the same rights possessed by man,
has her little contingent of immortal beings to conduct safely to