Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

People blame the shirt-makers and tailors because they pay two cents where they ought to pay fifty. It is not their fault; they are nothing but the weather-cocks, and society is the wind. Trade does not grow out of the Sermon on the Mount; merchants never have any hearts, they have only ledgers; two per cent a month is their Sermon on the Mount, and a balance on the wrong side of the ledger is their demonstration. [Laughter.] Nobody finds fault with them for it; everything according to the law of its life. A man pays as much for making shirts or coats as it is necessary to pay, and he would be a fool and a bankrupt if he paid any more. He needs only a hundred work-women; there are a thousand women standing at his door saying, “Give us work; and if it is worth ten cents to do it, we will do it for two;” and a hundred get the work, and nine hundred are turned into the street, to drag down this city into the pit that it deserves. [Loud applause.]

Now, what is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat and gibbet him in the New York Tribune? Not at all; it does the women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what is to be done. Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those thousand women may go out, and wherever they find work to do, do it without a stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to use the pen, to practise law, to write books, to serve in a library, to tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do.

This is all we claim; and we claim the ballot for this reason: the moment you give woman power, that moment men will see to it that she has the way cleared for her. There are two sources of power,--one is civil, the ballot; the other is physical, the rifle. I do not believe