The tenth count in the Suffrage Declaration is: "He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God."

In the "History of Woman Suffrage," the editors say: "Quite as many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact of her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations."

The first legislation demanded by the Suffragists was that which called for a change of the marriage laws, so as to admit of divorce, first for drunkenness, and later for several other causes. In discussing the matter in convention, Mrs. Stanton presented resolutions that declared, among other things, "That any constitution, compact, or covenant between human beings that failed to produce or promote human happiness, could not, in the nature of things, be of any force or authority; and it would be not only a right, but a duty, to abolish it. That though marriage be in itself divinely founded, and is fortified as an institution by innumerable analogies in the whole kingdom of universal nature, still a true marriage is only known by its results; and like the fountain, if pure, will reveal only pure manifestations. That observation and experience daily show how incompetent are men, as individuals, or as governments, to select partners in business, teachers for their children, ministers of their religion, or makers, adjudicators or administrators of their laws; and as the same weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of matrimonial partners, the dictates of humanity and common-sense alike show that the latter and most important contract should no more be perpetual than either or all of the former."

In supporting these resolutions, Mrs. Stanton said, "I place man above all governments, ecclesiastical and civil—all constitutions and laws." "In the settlement of any question, we must simply consider the highest good of the individual." Antoinette Brown Blackwell followed Mrs. Stanton with a series of resolutions in which she opposed her, and defended the sanctity of marriage. Wendell Phillips moved that neither series of resolutions be entered on the journal. Mr. Garrison said they did not come together to settle the question of marriage, but he should be sorry to rule out Mrs. Stanton's resolutions and speeches. Miss Anthony said: "I hope Mr. Phillips will withdraw his motion…. I totally dissent from the idea that this question does not belong on this platform. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter. By it, man gains all, woman loses all. Tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him; meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her…. By law, public sentiment, and religion, from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man…. She must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all."

The resolutions were carried and recorded, and are published to this day, with added testimony to the same effect from a hundred Suffrage sources. We turn back to trace one of the lines through which this teaching has come down. The Suffrage leaders mention as special inspirers of their movement besides Ernestine Rose (who seconded Mrs. Stanton's resolutions) and Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the writings of those women we find the same sentiments set forth with delicacy or vulgarity, according to the nature of the writer. Margaret Fuller, in her Dial essay, published in 1843, "The Great Lawsuit—Man Versus Woman, Woman Versus Man," says: "It is the fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman belongs to the man, instead of forming a whole with him. It is a vulgar error to suppose that love—a love—is to woman her whole existence. She is also born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the only virgin mother." Mary Wollstonecraft believed that marriage consisted solely of mutual affection, and that there should be no outward promise or tie to bind. If love were to die, the heart should seek other affinity. The licentious words of Frances Wright need not be repeated. With Mephistophelian promptings, Ernestine Rose stood forever a-tip-toe, whispering in the ear of the purer American feeling that would often have faltered. At the time of the passing of Mrs. Stanton's resolutions she said: "But what is marriage? A human institution, called out by the needs of the social, affectional human nature for human purposes…. If it is demonstrated that the real objects are frustrated, I ask, in the name of individual happiness and social morality and well-being, why should such a marriage be binding for life?… I ask that personal cruelty to the wife may be made a State's-prison offence, for which divorce shall be granted. Wilful desertion for one year should be a sufficient cause for divorce…. Habitual intemperance, or any other vice which makes the husband or wife intolerable and abhorrent to the other, ought to be sufficient cause for divorce." Essentially the same idea was repeated by Dr. Hulda Gunn in a recent Suffrage meeting.

In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs. Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: "If you take the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it…. But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up but cannot regulate."

These doctrines—from those of Frances Wright to those of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony—were put forth in the name of social purity and true marriage. A great body of Suffragists never have accepted them. They were repugnant, in this form, to a majority who were demanding "equal rights." In January, 1871, Mr. Hooker (husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker), said in the New York Evening Post: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of nobody who desires to change it." As he had just been referring to "persons who advocated easy divorce," and who originated the Suffrage movement, his statement that he knew of nobody who desired to change marriage seems funny.

It was one of the matters remarked upon with satisfaction by Suffrage leaders during our Constitutional Convention Suffrage campaign, that such a large number of speakers advocated Suffrage because of its advantage to the home. Mrs. Cora Seabury said: "Where woman is, homes naturally exist, and not without her. The 'divine veracity in nature,' which in her case has survived the chaos of ages and the varying civilization of six thousand years, is not now to be disproved by an incident comparatively so trivial as that of taking the ballot." Dr. Jacobi puts the idea in this way: "Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that woman suffrage aims at such a 'sexual revolution' as must cause the 'dissolution of the family.' The Suffrage claim does not aim at this; it seeks only to formulate, recognize, and define the revolution already effected, yet which leaves the family intact. The Patria Potestas is gone. A man has lost, first, the right to kill his own son, then the right to order the marriage of his daughter, then the right to absorb the property of his wife. Nevertheless, he survives, and the family, shorn of its portentous rights, bids fair in America to remain the happiest of all conceivable natural institutions; more profound than society, so immeasurably deeper than politics that the fortunate wife, daughter, or sister is puzzled when the two are mentioned in the same breath."

All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps necessary. The appeal must be to facts.

The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement." How can that be, when the women who inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on, proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom? Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.

Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved—the final grouping of the race—the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.

A proof that "women will not always be wives and mothers above all things else," is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says: "I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy." The organizations that are first to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.

But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set those of man's. It is false to say that man has "usurped the prerogative of Jehovah," in assigning her a sphere of action. He has assigned neither her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, "For the hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement, but in the beginning it was not so," he spoke the ultimate word. Save for adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life, which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive states.

There is a fine bit of unconscious humor in Miss Anthony's remark that "Woman must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all." Man is at present blinded by the belief that he must proffer marriage as woman will accept it, or not at all. Society has lodged with her what Mrs. Stanton calls "only the veto power." Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton apparently wish the women to do the proffering, the accepting, and the rejecting. With so insignificant a part assigned him, it would seem a pity that there should be a sort of necessity for man to play in the marriage role at all. When Suffrage leaders have so arranged matters that the bride retains her maiden name, she can spend her summers in Europe and her winters in Florida, while her husband works all the year round in New York to support her, without her being subjected to the mortification of seeming to desert the man whose name she bears.

You cannot teach this untruth to the girl without teaching it to the boy. The struggle of civilization has been to teach that manhood was not the great fact of man's life, and he has learned it through the chivalry and tenderness that appealed to and developed his higher nature. But if once he understands that woman does not hold herself in need of his chivalry and tenderness, the husbandhood and fatherhood that now bind him to one sacred vow of married love, and tame the savage within him, will not long prevent him from seeing his own advantage in the new order.

Wifehood and motherhood 'incidental relations.' They are incidental! Incidental not only to the continuance of the race in civilization, but to all that is best and holiest in that continuance. The mothers of the Rebellion say: "The love of offspring, common to all orders of women and all forms of animal life, tender and beautiful as it is, cannot as a sentiment rank with conjugal love. The one calls out only the negative virtues that belong to the apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance, self-sacrifice, exhausting the brain forces, ever giving, asking nothing in return; the other, the outgrowth of the two supreme powers in nature, the positive and negative magnetism, the centrifugal and centripetal forces, the masculine and feminine elements, possessing the divine power of creation in the universe of thought and action. Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love. This is marriage, and this is the only corner-stone of an enduring home."

The "homes" built solely upon this cornerstone have not endured in this country. The children born under such principles are taken care of by the "Community" in a building apart from that occupied by the "pure souls." The "institutional" bringing up of children was lately advocated in this city by Mrs. Stanton Blatch at Suffrage meetings.

The virtues that the Suffrage leaders denounce as "apathetic" are those that Christ signalized as the heavenly virtues, and are those which heroes emulate, whether they be women or men.

Dr. Jacobi says the Suffrage movement, "aims only to regulate and define the revolution already effected, and which leaves the family intact." I think it has been proven from words and acts that it does aim at just such a "sexual revolution" as threatens the family with dissolution. It aimed to accomplish this by every means in its power, by an industrialism which it desired should make woman independent of man, by divorce laws, and by the use of the ballot. Who has shorn man of all his portentous rights? Man himself, through the influence of woman. Is it likely, then, that he was taking steps in the direction of the destruction of his own home? He was endeavoring to build it on those sure foundations that make it what it is. He can build if woman occupies, but he cannot both fight for the home and against it. Circumstances, and not Suffrage cries, have forced or enticed woman into the trades and professions. She has gone farther afield for her work, partly because the Aegis of home is more broadly spread than it formerly could be on account of the very strength of the marriage tie, which makes honor, home, and woman more secure. So far as she has gone to help the home, and because of love of it, such causes have not hurt the family life, and will not. But when we come to Suffrage we have met a different matter. The vote is not an affair of feeling or opinion, like religious belief. The fact that the men of the family are the natural defenders of law, and the women are not, is seen at close quarters in the home, and in case of opposite votes and any serious resulting action, the father and son must stand in the attitude of actual physical as well as political antagonism to the mother and daughter. If it came to an issue, man would have to decide whether he would defend his own opinion, expressed in his ballot, or the opposite opinion expressed by his wife in her ballot. And the mere suggestion of difference in family opinion, final action upon which could only be taken by a resort to that in which the men must always be superior, would not only endanger family life and peace, but would develop a fatal inequality between the sexes. If the women of the family vote with the men, they only double the vote and the expense, without changing the result; if they vote against the men, they stand in the ridiculous attitude of opposing them where they cannot do more than pull hair, or inviting a revolution which they cannot stay.

As to the possibility of this, there are a few striking and suggestive facts at hand. The sound judgment and law-abiding element of this country expressed itself in no uncertain tones at the late election. After the defeat of Mr. Bryan, he was given a tremendous demonstration of approval at Denver, in which the women played a conspicuous part. Mrs. Bradford said: "The women tried to welcome you to the White House. When a few more stars have been added to the Equal Suffrage banner, the women will welcome you to the White House." Mrs. Patterson, President of the Equal Suffrage League, said in seconding the address of welcome: "Women of Colorado, I present to you the first president of the twentieth century— William Jennings Bryan." An invalid of whom I know, travelled from California to her home in Colorado in order to cast her vote for Bryan, while her husband cast his for McKinley in California. Mrs. Cannon, of Utah, was elected on the Free-Silver ticket, against her husband on the Gold-Standard ticket. Mrs. Cronine, a Populist member of the legislature of Colorado, is reported as saying: "It hurt my husband, a lifelong Republican, to see me vote against his party and carry both our children with me." Should there be political disturbance in Colorado and Utah, in 1900, here are three husbands on record who might be called upon by the United States authorities to put down by force, perhaps to kill, those whose lawlessness their wives had instigated and abetted. In one instance the man's own sons may fight against him, impelled to do so by the lessons taught by their mother. It requires no stretch of fancy to see the possibility of civil war brought to the doors of every home, when women vote. And the occasion that would bring it would not be the saving of the Nation's life, but its overthrow; not freedom for an oppressed class, but mingled bondage and license for a sex now free; not the preservation of home, but its destruction. The Suffrage women who here among us are talking so foolishly about arbitration and universal peace, seem to have no conception that with their next breath they are endeavoring to establish the conditions for the most horrible of conflicts—that of Sex. So far from the "taking of the ballot" being "trivial," it is the most serious and dangerous business in which a woman can engage.

The home is not a natural institution unless it is maintained by natural means, and woman suffrage and the home are incompatible. John Bright, in reply to Mr. Theodore Stanton's question why he opposed suffrage, said, "I cannot give you all the reasons for the view I take, but I act from the belief that to introduce women into the strife of political life would be a great evil to them, and that to our own sex no possible good could arise. When women are not safe under the charge or care of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, it is the fault of our non-civilization, and not of our laws. As civilization founded on Christian principles advances, women will gain all that is right for them to have, though they are not seen contending in the strife of political parties. In my experience I have observed evil results to many women who have entered hotly into political conflict and discussion. I would save them from it."

How true this is, and how wise are the fears expressed by Mr. Bright, we realize afresh at every study of the exciting campaign of November, 1896. The Woman's Journal, the Suffrage organ, published a letter from its California correspondent descriptive of the work of their women in watching the count on the Suffrage amendment. One woman who felt "terribly blue" says that a man patted her on the shoulder and told her to keep up her courage, and she says: "It broke me up, I can tell you, for I never could stand sympathy. If people will let me alone, I can grit my teeth and stand it, but when they say kind things to me I go to pieces. However, as I was bound I would not show those men how badly I felt, and give them a chance to say women were hysterical, I smiled weakly—very weakly, I'm afraid—but still it was a smile and passed as such. Then I began to get sick—ye gods! how sick! The excitement in the booth stopped, but there was an excitement in my head that had not been there before! Everything got black and began to go round. They could have counted us out a dozen times, and I should never have known the difference." Again the correspondent says: "Mrs. W. was so tired that she broke down." "Mrs. Babcock waxed eloquent, and had the meeting in tears. Miss Shaw said she wanted to speak of one who had been forgotten, because she came here before any of the rest, and worked so hard that she had ruined her health, and lay pale and white on her couch at home. She stood there, and the tears rolled down her cheeks, and she didn't try to wipe them away. Every one was crying. Mrs. Blinn said, 'I cannot speak. I feel too much to say anything,' and then she broke down and cried. Mrs. McCann soon had everybody crying about Miss Hay, and when Miss Hay got up she was crying too. So we had a very weepy morning, you see." In describing the departure of Miss Anthony and Rev. Anna Shaw for the East she says: "Oh, it was awful! awful! The whole thing was like a funeral."

With the steady improvement in machinery and in education, the wife and mother can be more and more relieved of work. But the home depends as much as ever upon her love, her skill, her care. She now has means, which science has just taught the world, of learning how to provide, on proper principles, for children, how to dress sensibly, cook wholesomely, make the home sanitary. Nursing is a fine art now, and comforts can be placed within the reach of every invalid, if the mother knows how to do it. If home is to be hospitable, and a centre of social influence, all the artistic and homely powers are demanded. If the family is to be well- dressed, the mother must attend to it. If home is to be beautiful, the mother and daughter must make it so. In these days, there is little need of slaving; and there is a glimpse ahead of leisure for thought and self- culture such as men would find it hard to make. The long and enforced retirement of maternity may prove a time for most valuable improvement. In our social life there is too little culture that is the result of absorption by a quiet process of mental assimilation. The place where this can be best achieved is in the home. The danger of our fascinating modern life, with its endless calls and opportunities outside, lies in the strain it puts upon systems that are far more delicately organized than man's. Nature meant that women should have periods of quiet. Let us honor our own natures, exalt our own opportunities, love and lead our own lives, and so bless the world and the Republic through perfected homes.

I have considered this question mainly from the view-point of the wife and mother; but the home relations are vastly broader. In regard to their whole scope, some of the Suffrage leaders have uttered this dictum: "The isolated household is responsible for a large share of woman's ignorance and degradation." If this declaration does not mean that the Suffrage movement aims to tear down the individual home, it means nothing. The world must judge which system is responsible for the larger share of woman's ignorance and degradation.