THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

155

When a committee appealed to Congress, asking that when the negroes were enfran­chised the loyal women might share their freedom, Congress answered: “It is the negro’s hour, women must wait.” The negro’s hour struck, again women asked for liberty, and were again assured that Congress had weightier measures to consume its time and attention—it had the South to reconstruct, and the North to bring back to a sound business basis. The severest form of punishment it could devise for the crime of treason was disfranchisement, reducing traitors to the level of loyal women, who had given all they had for their country, and this is the only recognition that Congress has ever granted them. I have traveled in many countries, and in every one, save in these United States, I have seen stately monuments erected in grateful memory of the patriotic services of women. We had a faint hope of at least a part in one, when we learned that a national monument to the Pilgrims was to be unveiled at Plymouth, Mass. On the great day, scores of women gathered to witness the ceremonies. We were told that this government had taught the nations of the world the great principle that, “taxation without representation is tyranny.” We sighed as we remembered the taxes we had paid, and yet were still refused representa­tion. We were also told that in this country under God the people rule, and yet the constitution of every state in the Union, at that time, declared it was the males, and not the people who rule. The orator again assured us that the powers of this government were just, since governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; but they recently hung a woman, in one of these just states, who had never given her consent to the law under which she was executed, nor had the consent of women, her peers, ever been asked regarding it. Then we were told that as the voice of the peo­ple is the voice of God, and this was repeated both in Latin and in English, that there might be no doubt in regard to it, that the laws of our land were the crystallized voice of Deity. The speaker, forgetting that in the compass of the people’s voice there is a soprano as well as a bass, and that if the voice of the people is the voice of God, we will never know what His voice is until the bass and soprano unite in harmonious sound, the resultant of which will be the voice of God. After many other statements of a similar character, which are true in spirit, but had never been practiced by any nation, the monument was unveiled, and our hearts sank with intense disappointment when we read the inscription, “Erected by a grateful country in honor of the Pilgrim Fathers.” We had again witnessed the evidence of a country’s easy forgetfulness of its debt to women. We felt just as we do when we gaze on that picture so familiar to you all; a ship in the background, between it and the shore is a man carrying what seems to be a woman in his arms, on the beach kneel a company of people, and farther up the beach stand another group with uplifted hands, thanking God for their deliv­erance. They look like men and women. You wonder what company of people it is, and read the inscription beneath the picture to learn, that it is not a company of men and women at all, but is a representation of “The landing of the Forefathers.” You instinctively exclaim how kind the forefathers were to carry each other ashore, and how much some of them resemble mothers, but they were not mothers, they were all fathers, every mother of them.

There never was another country which had so many parents as we have had, but they have all been fathers—pilgrim fathers, Plymouth fathers, forefathers, revolutionary fathers, city fathers and church fathers, fathers of every description—but, like Topsy, we have never had a mother. In this lies the weakness of all republics. They have been fathered to death. The great need of our country today is a little mothering to undo the evils of too much fathering. Like Israel of old, when the people were reduced to their utmost extremity,in order to save the nation, there was needed a ruler who w r as at once a statesman, a commander-in-chief of the armies and a right­eous judge, who w r ould render justice and be impervious to bribes. God called a woman to rule, and Deborah tells us in her wonderful ode that the great need of the nation in this hour of its extremity was motherhood applied to government, when she exclaims, “Behold the condition of Israel when I, Deborah, a mother in Israel, arose.”