I now propose to read from a pamphlet sent to me by a lady whom I am not able to characterize as a resident of any State, although I believe she resides in the State of Maine.  I do not know whether she be wife or mother.  She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D.T.  Whitney.  I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women.  I say to-day it ought to be in every household in this broad land.  It ought to be the domestic gospel of every true, gentle, loving, virtuous woman upon all this continent.  There is not one line or syllable in it that is not written in letters of gold.  I shall not read it, for my strength does not suffice, nor will the patience of the Senate permit, but from beginning to end it breathes the womanly sentiment which has made pure and great men and gentle and loving women.

I will venture to say, in my great admiration and respect for this woman, whether she be married or single, she ought to be a wife, and ought to be a mother.  Such a woman could only have brave and wise men for sons and pure and virtuous women for daughters.  Here is her advice to her sex.  I am only sorry that every word of it could not be read in the Senate, but I have trespassed too long.

Mr. Cockrell.  Let it be printed in your remarks.

Mr. Vest. I shall ask that it be printed.  I will undertake, however, to read only a few sentences, not of exceptional superiority to the rest, because every sentence is equal to every other.  There is not one impure unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it.  Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for this production.

After all—­

She says to her own sex—­

    After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it
    would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such
    existence as they could arrange without us.

Oh, how true that is; how true!

In blessed homes, or in scattered dissipations of show, amusement, or the worse which these shows and amusements are but terribly akin to, women give purpose to and direct the results of all men’s work.  If the false standards of living first urge them, until at length the horrible intoxication of the game itself drives them on further and deeper, are we less responsible for the last state of those men than for the first?

Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a simpler and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would take them anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more unmitigated evil?  Ah, there come both answer and errand again.  Raise the fallen—­at least, save the growing womanhood—­stop the destruction that rushes accelerating on, before you challenge new difficulty and danger with an indiscriminate franchise.  Are not these bad women the very “plenty” that would out-balance you at the polls if you persist in trying the “patch-and-plaster” remedy of suffrage and legislation.