Wyoming Territory!  Washington Territory!  Where are their large cities?  Where are the localities in these Territories where the strain upon popular government must come?  The Senator from New Hampshire, who is so conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months since by his ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States.  He proposes that $77,000,000 of the people’s money be taken in order to strike down the great foe to republican government, illiteracy.  How was that illiteracy brought upon this country?  It was by giving the suffrage to unprepared voters.  It is not my purpose to go back into the past and make any partisan or sectional appeal, but it is a fact known to every intelligent man that in one single act the right of suffrage was given without preparation to hundreds of thousands of voters who to-day can scarcely read.  That Senator proposes now to double, and more than double, that illiteracy.  He proposes to give the negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly unprepared as they are for it.

In a convention some two years and a half ago in the city of Louisville an intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did.  The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars.  They go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what must be the result?

Mr. President, it is not my purpose to speak of the inconveniences, for they are nothing more, of woman suffrage.  I trust that as a gentleman I respect the feelings of the ladies and their advocates.  I am not here to ridicule.  My purpose only is to use legitimate argument as to a movement which commands respectful consideration, if for no other reason than because it comes from women.  But it is impossible to divest ourselves of a certain degree of sentiment when considering this question.

I pity the man who can consider any question affecting the influence of woman with the cold, dry logic of business.  What man can, without aversion, turn from the blessed memory of that dear old grandmother, or the gentle words and caressing hand of that blessed mother gone to the unknown world, to face in its stead the idea of a female justice of the peace or township constable?  For my part I want when I go to my home—­when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry world—­I want to go back, not to be received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman.  I want to go back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon the construction of the Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life and domestic love.