I cannot withhold my sympathy and support from the great cause here advocated. I think that our friend Mr. Malcolm¹Douglass accurately paraphrases the remarks of an earlier speaker at the convention, the Reverend Charles Howard Malcom, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Newport, Rhode Island, from 1857 to 1877. Later the same day, Malcom was elected a vice president of the Rhode Island Woman's Suffrage Association. Richard M. Bayles, ed., History of Newport County. Rhode Island: From the Year 1638 to the Year 1887, Including the Settlement of Its Towns, and Their Subsequent Progress (New York, 1888), 438-39; Providence Daily Journal, 12 December 1868. placed this question on the true ground, that of absolute right, not so much with reference to the peculiar wrongs inflicted upon woman by the present arrangements of society, but the absolute right to vote and the absolute duty which every human being is under to perform his or her part for the common welfare.
Woman’s right to vote rests on the same foundation that man’s right to vote rests upon. There is not a woman in the country who has not political preferences, and why should she not have the right to express those preferences. The women of this nation wanted Grant for President and not Seymour.²Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour in the presidential election of 1868. It would have been glorious if they could have expressed that preference.
I cannot say much about woman’s wrongs. The men love them too much to wrong them. They have wrongs on the statute book, to be sure; but if every wrong enumerated were righted to-morrow, I should be just as strongly in favor of woman’s suffrage as now. Everybody in this country with a conscience and a conviction has a duty to perform towards this government, and that is to infuse that conscience and that conviction into the government by voting for such men and for such measures as accord with their highest conviction and their highest conscience.
I expect to see the day when woman shall take her place on the floor of Congress. I believe they would be as likely to be influential in debate on the floor of Congress as elsewhere. I know at any rate that in every debate that I have ever yet had with a woman I have got the worst of it.The women and the negroes are just now about equal, and I think that we should go along together. I should like to attach myself to the ladies in the efforts that I make for liberty and progress, for I see that you have the inside track. You have ways of attaching yourselves to the governing power which we have not. You are beautiful and we are not. Your faces have a charm to the governing power. Ours have not. I believe that a woman’s