Sidney Smith

“ How many a loving father has seen a noble estate, with its ancestral halls and monumental oaks, decreed by the law itself to pass away from his only child, the last of a long and noble line, merely because she was helpless and a woman, and some "accident of an accident," the "tenth transmitter of a foolish face," far remote of kin, and having too much already, was of the dominant, perhaps only the domineering, gender. ”

“ Remember—not High Court of Parliament, but the Court the of Common Pleas, shuts on our women the door of the Constitution—they are denied their suffrage rights, not by the Law, but only by the Lawyers. ”

“ Again I postulate, on what earthly ground is sex picked out as a disqualification of adults possessing in other respects all the legal elements of franchisement? The suffrage is a public right, the highest known to the law. The people acquire their privileges for each individual, and for all. Women are the major part of the community. If the general public, by usage, acquire a right, can nobody enjoy it who does not first of all prove that he has been in the use personally to claim its exercise? ”

“ Is it fair that the son should be armed with all the privileges and facilities of making his way in the world, and have the family estate handed over by the law entirely to himself, while his sister is at once to be left without the means of living, and disinherited by the very laws she is forced to obey, and by the State that taxes her without her consent, to uphold a system that robs her of her natural patrimony? ”

“ To cap the climax of this dialectic farce, our law and constitution set a woman to rule over us—to negative by her single veto the unanimous voice of both Houses of Parliament—to declare war, make peace, or conclude treaties binding us all—while we pronounce her congenitally incapable, by reason of her sex, to appreciate the qualifications of a single commoner. ”

“ But who ever heard in law of an absurdity so glaring as that of one person deriving a right from another who has no right? How could a wife impart to her husband the qualification she herself does not possess? So entirely is the franchise vested in the wife, that whenever she dies, the husband's title ipso facto ceases. ”

“ Society condemns our women to bear alone the skaith and scorn of its vices. Hundreds of thousands of them, abandoned and world forsaken, once innocent, trustful, guileless, "for necessity of present life," live but to drag others down to the dust to which themselves have been cast by the human frailties which they tempt, and for which they suffer. ”

“ Why is the want of public spirit which keeps one woman or many from the polling-booth, to forfeit the right for others who desire to exercise it? Why are the social habits of one age to fasten incapacity upon the citizens of its successor? How is the failure to poll in Yorkshire, to be counted against the suffrage in Birmingham? How far is it to go back? If it counts against sex, it ought to tell against individuals. Not above half the constituency vote at any election. There are many thousands of registered electors who have never recorded their votes for fifty, even sixty years. ”

“ In spite of all our prejudices we are compelled, by the very necessities of our domestic arrangements, to delegate the most important functions of the instructor—those which mould the wax of humanity while yet it is molten, and bend the twig while yet it is lithe—to the nurse and the wife, whom yet we fail to prepare by our social culture for their momentous task. ”

“ The human soul is of no sex. Can we tell the gender of the mind or intellect? Is not woman, as man, fashioned in the image of her maker Is there one mental faculty which has been omitted in her cerebral economy? Even if it could be contended that some intellectual power has, by the habits of society or the circumstances of her position, been unequally or imperfectly developed, does not the same answer apply in her case as that which is given to the objection to the enfranchisement male stupidity—the exercise of the function will educate for its due discharge? ”

“ If the Parliament of 1832 believed that women were then legally incapable, why did it step out of its way for the first time in the whole course of the statutes at large to insert the word "male" into the Act? Every other uses the term freeholder, people, person, without ever touching upon sex. If women at common law, or by statute, were from time immemorial excluded, why did not the Legislature continue its customary phraseology? ”

“ I have proved that the very words of the common law and of the statutes creating the franchise apply indifferently to women as to men—that the only presumption contended for against woman's rights is non-user, and that non-user never renders public rights obsolete. ”

“ Is the earnestness with which they are pursued by those who encounter ridicule, unmannerly rudeness, and abuse, in a cause which is really identified with the best interests of the community, to be rewarded only with contumely, and baffled by mere masterly inactivity? Are women's rights not rights? ”

“ Among savages in general, it is the women who really discharge every duty but that of fighting and hunting. Even among civilised nations, how many classes devolve, not only the industrial drudgery, but the business, of their calling, upon the women. The most contemptuous gibe the fisherwomen can fling at their neighbour is that "she cannot keep her husband." The great Napoleonic wars that drew the male population away to the army, made the women of France fill up the gap, by carrying on the work and managing the business of civil life ”

“ We choose a queen to govern us. Scotch and English of us have always disowned the Salique law. Our Augustan age was that of a female, who took an active part in ruling her empire,and brought it to a point of greatness it never before had reached. As a rule, where it has been a custom for women to pretermit the discharge of public duties which by reason of their property, residence, or descent the owners had, a right to exercise, it has been simply on account of want of interest in the function, or by exemption, not by reason of exclusion or disqualification. ”

“ Think of what we might be and do by calling in to the responsible work of civil society a whole half of all the human beings whose minds we stunt and whose faculties we cramp until, finding no intelligent and worthy outlet for the cravings of their spiritual energies, they waste the talents given them to return with usury, and pervert gifts which, wisely improved,might double the wealth of society, and immeasurably raise the public virtue of the nation. ”

“ Those especially which refer to the universal public rights of the poorest and most ignorant, as well as the highest and most cultured, ought to be so plain that " he who runs may read." There is no witchcraft in jurisprudence—even that of England. No citizen need approach it as if it were a Delphic oracle to be interpreted only by its priests. The construction of English sentences uttered by one's own representatives—ought that to be "past all under standing?" It is the concrete will of the men who meet us at the polling booth, and ask us for "our most sweet voices." ”

“ What women can do, the conduct of their own cause can best avouch. Where has sounder judgment, more unfailing prudence, more indefatigable assiduity,and more conspicuous practical ability sustained the life and ministered to the promotion of a great public object, than the gifts which have distinguished the chief agents in the assertion of Woman's Rights? ”

“ The plain truth is, the objection to female enfranchisement is founded on utter ignorance of the natural history of the genus homo. There are countries in which the body-guard of the sovereign consists of his wives. The amazon is no myth, but a present reality. There are populous tribes in which the social position of the sexes is reversed, and the men, entirely subordinated to the women, fully recognise their own as a purely subservient status, deferring in everything to their wives as the dominant power. ”

“ If we expect our women fitly to discharge their infinitely important office in the economy of education, we must emancipate them from the bondage of conventional subordination, and call them to the exercise of those political functions in which we now inhibit their participation. ”

“ Is it permissible to presume so far as to whisper in the ear of Queen, Lords, and Commons, that the exercise of this power of political excommunication by a judicial pope, constituted infallible by Act of Parliament, is wholly unconstitutional, and dangerously impolitic. The House of Commons, by long, uniform, immemorial tradition, is the sole legal judge of all particulars relative to its own constitution, and the qualifications of those who elect it. ”

“ The earnestness it inspires is not the eccentricity of ill-directed enthusiasm, or the mere errand of the female Quixote. We all owe a heartfelt tribute of respect to those who for its sake have patiently borne the misconstruction to which it has subjected them—the quips, and sentences, and those "paper bullets of the brain," which, because they are so light, hit all the harder in the small talk of conventional frivolity. ”

“ It is the bare right to vote of which the law constitutes him her proxy—her mandatory—her attorney—to borrow the term used by Dames Packington and Copley. Can a trustee have powers ultra vires of the trust? Can a proxy do that which his author cannot? What is an attorney but one executing a power which another has? ”

“ Whenever it confers a new right, it restricts it to every "male person." Whenever it perpetuates existing franchises, it continues them to "every person," leaving the word "male" out on set system. At the very least, Parliament manifestly leaves the question open; and I have shown that, by the constitution, the House of Commons, that "High Court of Parliament," is the only tribunal competent to determine the rights of electors. Let me not be misunderstood. It is not necessary for me to argue that the franchises created by the statute of 1832 included women. ”

“ Call them to a mission more worthy of their origin, more deserving of their destiny. Arm them with that self-protecting culture that will enable them to pursue a useful calling. Fit them—our girls, as we do our boys—to enter, if need be, upon the great business of life. ”

“ That is the sort of logic presented by the Court of Common Pleas. Why does it stop at the franchise? Why does it not refuse to women a right of way, because it was not proved that any but men had ever used the road? Very likely a negro never voted. Why not stop the first black man? If we are to pick and choose fanciful exceptions at our pleasure, we may empty the polling-booth and the House. ”

“ Of all great powers ours is the weakest in material resources. More than half the food we consume we have to import, and yearly our state of dependence becomes greater. It is on the breed of our men, on our people, on the force of character,the energy of cerebral action, the sum of mental power, we must rely solely to sustain our position. Our governing classes are palpably becoming weaker and less capable to maintain their status. ”

“ If women were in the same category as aliens, lunatics, or minors, the word male was quite superfluous. The terms "every person not subject to legal incapacity" would have included women—would have left them outside the constitution, without the use of any adjective specification. Still more singular is it that in reserving and keeping alive all the qualifications in existence before those itself created, this statute falls back exactly to the accustomed phraseology of the earlier Acts. ”

“ Replace the desire for the admiration of others by the nobler ambition of self-respect; make our women too proud to be vain—proud of useful duties faithfully discharged, of lofty purposes successfully achieved,of solidity of character, and the spirit of independence. ”

“ In our country, who is there who cannot tell off, in his own circle, or within his personal knowledge, cases of women who have, by their commanding intelligence, redeemed the fortunes of a futile husband, or, as widows, brought up and put out into life the family he failed to support? ”

“ What has ruined Turkey and every eastern country, what ultimately sealed the doom of Athens, but leaving the culture of each rising generation of the governing classes to the sultanas and female slaves of the seraglio and the harem? ”

“ That men have voted, so far from being a reason for confining public rights to the sex, is actually the foundation for the plea that by their assertion of them individually they have imparted and extended them to those who have not—a part of the public have acquired them for the whole.
The judgment of the Court of Common Pleas proceeds on Justice Bovill's two propositions, that "Women are not included in these words, 'every man,' in the Act;" and secondly, "Women are subject to legal incapacity." ”

“ I have already touched, in this connection, on the part nature and necessity assigned to women in the formation of the physical constitution, the personal habits, the moral and mental character of the rising generation. It is to the gifts and faculties of the mother that we trace the genius and proclivities of the child. ”

“ It is my abiding conviction, that by having "cabined, cribbed, confined" more than one-half of our subjects in the moral zenana, the conventional nunnery of our national prejudices, and cramping their minds, as the Chinese do their feet, so that intellectually we try to make them totter when nature bids them walk as freely as their gaolers, we are depriving the nation of a power, which, if wisely and trustingly developed, would add immeasurably to its inventive enterprise and progressive energy. ”