Give a hundred women honest wages for capacity and toil, and ninety-nine out of the hundred will disdain to win it by vice. That is a cure for licentiousness. (Applause).
I wish to put into our civil life the element of woman's right to shape the laws, for all our social life copies largely from the statute-book. Let woman dictate at the capital, let her say to Wall Street, "My votes on finance are to make stocks rise and fall," and Wall Street will say to Columbia College, "Open your classes to woman; it needs be that she should learn." The moment you give her the ballot, you take bonds of wealth and fashion and conservatism, that they will educate this power, which is holding their interest in its right hand. I want to spike the gun of selfishness; or rather, I want to double-shot the cannon of selfishness. Let Wall Street say, "Look you! whether the New York Central stock shall have a toll placed upon it, whether my million shares shall be worth sixty cents in the market or eighty, depends upon whether certain women up there at Albany know the laws of trade and the secrets of political economy"—and Wall Street will say, "Get out of the way, Dr. Adams!—absent yourself, Dr. Spring!—we don't care for Jewish prejudices; these women must have education!" (Loud applause). Show me the necessity in civil life, and I will find you forty thousand pulpits that will say St. Paul meant just that. (Renewed applause). Now, I am orthodox; I believe in the Bible; I reverence St. Paul; I believe his was the most masterly intellect that God ever gave to the race; I believe he was the connecting link, the bridge, by which the Asiatic and European mind were joined; I believe that Plato ministers at his feet; but, after all, he was a man, and not God. (Applause). He was limited, and made mistakes. You can not anchor this western continent to the Jewish footstool of St. Paul; and, after all, that is the difficulty—religious prejudice. It is not fashion—we shall beat it; it is not the fastidiousness of the exquisite—we shall smother it; it is the religious prejudice, borrowed from a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. That is the real Gibraltar with which we are to grapple, and my argument with that is simply this: You left it when you founded a republic; you left it when you inaugurated Western civilization; we must grow out of one root.
Let me, in closing, show you, by one single anecdote, how mean a thing a man can be. You have heard of Mrs. Norton, "the woman Byron," as critics call her—the granddaughter of Sheridan, and the one on whose shoulders his mantle has rested—a genius by right of inheritance and by God's own gift. Perhaps you may remember that when the Tories wanted to break down the reform administration of Lord Melbourne, they brought her husband to feign to believe his wife unfaithful, and to sue her before a jury. He did so, brought an action, and an English jury said she was innocent; and his own counsel has since admitted, in writing, under his own signature, that during the time he prosecuted that trial, the Honorable Mr. Norton (for so he is in the Herald's Book) confessed all the time that he did not believe a word against his wife, and knew she was innocent. She is a writer. The profits of her books, by the law of England, belong to her husband. She has not lived with