that two augurs could meet with gravity. What would he do here? And still more preposterous, if not ludicrous, is it, when woman voluntarily stops and becomes the agent of her own degradation, and with her own hands builds barriers against her own advancement; piling up opposition, Pelion upon Ossa, when the majority against her, even in New York and New England, is already appalling? And then for us to be referred to the teachings and experiences of the past for lessons in compromise, cold, calculating compromise, such as Abolitionists ever blasted with the breath of their nostrils, and scourged from their presence with fiery indignation! The Equal Rights Association is not to be turned aside by any seductive devices from its high and holy purpose of enfranchisement for all American citizens, knowing no race, no color, no sex.
P. P.
Oct. 7, 1869.
Dear Revolution:—Pardon a few plain words from an earnest friend of human suffrage.
Your course opposing the Fifteenth Amendment and Political (combined with moral) Temperance action, seems to me absolutely suicidal, and must and will logically leave you to the tender mercies of negro-drivers or haters and rumsellers and their sympathizers. How much human suffrage can hope for at their hands, judge ye!
J. K. Phœnix.
P. S.—To say I am utterly astonished and grieved at The Revolution therein but feebly expresses my feelings. But we shall see what you will effect by it.
The Revolution criticises, "opposes," the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become the equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two millions black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Woman's Suffrage Association make woman's suffrage their test of loyalty, not negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? is the one and only question in our catechism.In this period of reconstruction the Woman Suffrage Associations sent their first delegates to National political conventions. The appointment of Susan B. Anthony to the Democratic Presidential Convention was a new and unlooked-for sensation.
The Revolution, New York, July 9, 1868.
