To Charles Sumner.
Wayland, 1870.
Dear and honored Mr. Sumner,--If I were to write to you every time the spirit moves me to thank you for some good thing you have done, you would have a very voluminous correspondence.
I lay the flattering unction to my soul that I am a very enlightened statesman, and my reasons for forming such a high opinion of myself are, that whenever I arrive at conclusions on any subjects which have occupied my mind, you are always sure to indorse my views.
Many a time, after reading your speeches or debates aloud, I have exclaimed, “There it is again!
You see Mr. Sumner says just what I have been hoping and expecting he would say.”
I differ from you often enough, however, to prove that my soul is my own.
In your speech you say, “The oppressiveness of a tax is not to be measured by the insensibility of the people on whose shoulders it is laid.
It is a curiosity of depotism that the people are too often unconscious of their slavery, as they are also unconscious of bad laws.
A wise and just government measures its duties, not by what the people will bear without a murmur, but by what is most for their welfare.”
My dear Mr. Sumner, is not the same remark applicable to the assertion that the elective franchise ought not to be bestowed on women until the majority of them demand it?
I have been often urged to
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write to you on what is called the “Woman question,” but I have foreborne, because I thought your shoulders (strong and willing as they are) were already loaded with sufficient weight.
Moreover, when I have perfect confidence in the moral and intellectual insight of a man, I am not desirous to hurry his conclusions.
You are so organized that you cannot help following principles, wheresoever they may lead; and, sooner or later, you will see clearly that our republican ideas cannot be consistently carried out while women are excluded from any share in the government.
I reduce the argument to very simple elements.
I pay taxes for property of my own earning and saving, and I do not believe in “taxation without representation.”
As for representation by proxy, that savors too much of the plantation-system, however kind the master may be. I am a human being; and every human being has a right to a voice in the laws which claim authority to tax him, to imprison him, or to hang him. The exercise of rights always has a more salutary effect on character than the enjoyment of privileges.
Any class of human beings to whom a position of perpetual subordination is assigned, however much they may be petted and flattered, must inevitably be dwarfed, morally and intellectually.
But I will not enlarge on the theme.
For forty years I have keenly felt my limitations as a woman, and have submitted to them under perpetual and indignant protest.
It is too late for the subject to be of much interest to me personally.
I have walked in fetters all my pilgrimage, and now I have but little farther to go. But I see so clearly that domestic and public life would be so much ennobled by the
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perfect equality and companionship of men and women in all the departments of life, that I long to see it accomplished, for the order and well-being of the world. 