speaker spoke of the abuse and injustice done to the Bible by those who make it the shelter and apologist for all the wrong, vileness, and sneaking meanness that the world bears up; and closed with a testimony against the cowardice of those time-serving ministers who allow their manhood to be suffocated by a white cravat, and who never publicly take sides with what they see to be a good cause, until "popular noises" indicate that the time has come for speaking out their opinions.
The President then introduced to the audience Wendell Phillips, Esq., of Boston:
Madam President:—I am exceedingly happy to see that this question calls together so large an audience; and perhaps that circumstance will make me take exception to some representations of the previous speakers as to the unpopularity of this movement. The gentleman who occupied this place before me thought that perhaps he might count the numbers of those that occupied this platform as the real advocates of that question. Oh, no! The number of those who sympathize with us must not be counted so. Our idea penetrates the whole life of the people. The shifting hues of public opinion show like the colors on a dove's neck; you can not tell where one ends, or the other begins. [Cheers]. Everybody that holds to raising human beings above the popular ideas, and not caring for artificial distinctions, is on our side; I think I can show my friend that. Whenever a new reform is started, men seem to think that the world is going to take at once a great stride. The world never takes strides. The moral world is exactly like the natural. The sun comes up minute by minute, ray by ray, till the twilight deepens into dawn, and dawn spreads into noon. So it is with this question. Those who look at our little island of time do not see it; but, a hundred years later, everybody will recognize it.
No one need be at all afraid; there is no disruption, no breaking away from old anchorage—not at all. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there were two movements—first, the peasants in the town were striving to fortify each man his own house—to set up the towns against the kings; then, in the colleges, the great philosophers were striving each to fortify his own soul to make a revolution against Rome. The peasants branded the collegians as "infidels," and the collegians showed the peasants to be "traitors." Cordially they hated each other; blindly they went down to their graves, thinking they had been fighting each other; but, under the providence of God, they were entwined in the same movement. Now, if I could throw you back to-day into the civilization of Greece and Rome, I could show you the fact that our question is two thousand years old. [Cheers.] In the truest sense, it did not begin in 1848, as my friend Dr. Hunt stated; it began centuries ago. Did you ever hear of the old man who went to the doctor, and asked him to teach him to speak prose? "Why, my dear fellow," was the reply, "you have been speaking prose all your life." But he did not know it. So with some people in regard to the movement for Woman's Rights.
Many think the steps taken since 1850 are shaking this land with a new infidelity. Now, this infidelity is a good deal older than the New Testament. When man began his pilgrimage from the cradle of Asia, woman was not allowed to speak before a court of justice. To kill a woman was just as great a sin as to kill a cow, and no greater. To sell an unlicensed herb in the city of Calcutta, was exactly the same crime as to kill a woman. She did not belong to the human race. Come down thousands of years, and the civilization of Greece said, "Woman has not got enough of truth in her to be trusted in the court of justice;" and, if her husband wants to give her to a brother or friend, he can take her to their door, and say, "Here, I give you this." And so it continues till you reach the feudal ages; when woman, though she might be queen or duchess, was often not competent to testify in a court of justice. She had not soul enough, men believed, to know a truth from a lie. That is the code of the feudal system. But all at once the world has waked up, and thinks a man is not a man because he has a pound of muscle, or because he has a stalwart arm; but because he has thoughts, ideas, purposes: he can commit crime, and he is capable of virtue.
No man is born in a day. A baby is always six months old before he is twenty-one. Our fathers, who first reasoned that God made all men equal, said: "You sha'n't hang a man until you have asked him if he consents to the law." Some meddlesome fanatic, engaged in setting up type, conceived the idea, that he need not pay his tax till he was represented before the law: then why should woman do so? Now, I ask, what possible reason is there that woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a laborer, as a capitalist, as an artist, as a citizen, should be subjected to any laws except such as govern man? What moral reason is there for this, under the American idea? Does not the same interest, the same strong tie, bind the mother to her children, that bind the father? Has she not the same capacity to teach them that the father has? and often more? Now, the law says: "If the father be living, the mother is nothing; but, if the father be dead, the mother is everything." Did she inherit from her husband his great intellect? If she did not, what is the common sense of such a statute? The mother has the same rights, in regard to her children, that the father has: there should be no distinction.
Yours is not a new reform. The gentleman who occupied the platform a few moments ago gave the common representation of this cause: "If a husband doesn't do about right, his wife will pull his hair; and, if you let her have her way, she may vote the Democratic ticket, and he the Republican; and vice versa." Well, now, my dear friend, suppose it were just so; it is too late to complain. That point has long been settled; if you will read history a little, you will see it was settled against you. In the time of Luther, it was a question: "Can a woman choose her own creed?" The feudal ages said: "No; she believes as her husband believes, of course." But the reformers said: "She ought to think for herself; her husband is not her God." "But," it was objected, "should there be difference of opinion between man and wife, the husband believing one creed and the wife another, there would be continual discord." But the reply was: "God settled that; God has settled it that every responsible conscience should have a right to his own creed." And Christendom said: "Amen." The reformers of Europe, to this day, have allowed freedom of opinion; and who says that the experience of three centuries has found the husband and wife grappling each other's throats on religious differences? It would be Papal and absurd to deny woman her religious rights. Then why should she not be allowed to choose her party?
We claim the precedents in this matter. It was arranged and agreed upon, in the reform of Europe, that women should have the right to choose their religious creeds. I say, therefore, this is not a new cause; it is an old one. It is as old as the American idea. We are individuals by virtue of our brains, not by virtue of our muscles. "Why do you women meddle in politics?" asked Napoleon of De Staël. "Sire, so long as you will hang us, we must ask the reason," was the answer. The whole political philosophy of the subject is in that. The instant you say, "Woman is not competent to go to the ballot-box," I reply: "She is not competent to go to the gallows or the State prison. If she is competent to go to the State prison, then she is competent to go to the ballot-box, and tell how thieves should be punished." [Applause].
Man is a man because he thinks. Woman has already begun to think. She has touched literature with the wand of her enchantment, and it rises to her level, until woman becomes an author as well as reader. And what is the result? We do not have to expurgate the literature of the nineteenth century before placing it in the hands of youth. Those who write for the lower level sink down to dwell with their kind.
Mr. Sargent and Mr. Clarke expatiated on the wholesome influence of the side-by-side progress of the sexes. There are no women more deserving of your honest approbation than those who dare to work singly for the elevation of their sex....
Woman's Rights and Negro Rights! What rights have either women or negroes that we have any reason to respect? The world says: "None!"
There has lately been a petition carried into the British Parliament, asking—for what? It asks that the laws of marriage and divorce shall be brought into conformity with the creed and civilization of Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. The state of British law, on the bill of divorce, was a disgrace to the British statute-book. Whose was the intellect and whose the heart to point out, and who had the courage to look in the face of British wealth and conservatism, and claim that the law of divorce was a disgrace to modern civilization? It was the women of Great Britain
