but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last
shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last
disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance, not only in
respect to the right of suffrage, but in every other respect the peer
and equal of her brother, man.

* * * * *

Mr. VEST. Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects
popular government based on the will of the people as expressed
through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so. If this
Government, which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall
ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature, or corrupt
suffrage. If the ship of state launched by our fathers shall ever be
destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared
suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures
and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When
any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with
this privilege it is used, accomplished, and eternal.

The Senator who last spoke on this question refers to the successful
experiment in regard to woman-suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming
and Washington. Mr. President, it is not upon the plains of the
sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be
tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely settled regions
of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when
corrupt everywhere else. The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the
cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends
everywhere in all history. Whilst the country has been pure and
patriotic, the cities have been the first cancers to appear upon the