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

Suffrage for woman (1861）

Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: I wish I could carry on the same strain of remark which has just been addressed to you, for that touches the very heart of the question which brings us together this morning. We are seeking to change certain laws,--laws based on sex. Now, as he has suggested, there is another realm beside that of law, there is another arena beside the civil, and that is the social state. We arrange certain matters of the statute-book; we let other matters arrange themselves, according to what we call fashion and unfettered public opinion,--that is, society. We may gather a very distinct idea of what would be the natural result in civil affairs, if we look for a moment at what has been the result of the conflict of powers in the social state,--for there power works out untrammelled its natural result. Majorities do not rule there, but real power,--the agreeable, the fit, the useful,--that which commends itself to the best sense.

Social life began centuries ago, just where legal life stands to-day. It began with the recognition of man only. Woman was nothing; she was a drudge; she was a toy; she was a chattel; she was a connecting link between man and the brute. That is Oriental civilization. We drift westward, into the sunlight of Christianity [111] and European civilization, and as Milton paints animal life freeing itself from the clod, and tells us, you recollect, of the tawny lion, with his mane and fore-feet liberated, pawing to get free his hinder parts, so the mental has gradually freed itself from the incumbrance of the animal, and we come round to a society based on thought, based on soul. What is the result? Why, it would be idle to say that there woman is man's equal; she is his superior. In social life she has taken the lead; she dictates. Hers is this realm, and from her judgment there is no appeal. Her intellect summoned literature into being, almost; as a reader she has demanded that it shall be decent; and now she takes her pen as a writer, and controls the world, as the sceptre of genius always controls it, no matter what lips, male or female, God's living coal has touched.

That, I say, is the counterpart, the picture, that represents to us what law and the civil state are to undergo in their successive changes. We are here to-day only to endeavor to enforce on the consideration of the civil state those elements of power which have already made a social state. You do not find it necessary to-day to say to a husband: “Your wife has a right to read;” or necessary to say to Dickens, “You have as many women over your pages as men.” You do not find it necessary to say to the male members of a church that the women members have a right to change their creed. All that is settled; nobody contests it. If a man stood up here and said, “I am a Calvinist, and therefore my wife is bound to be one,” --you would send him to a lunatic asylum. You would say, “Poor man! don't judge him by what he says; he does n't mean it.” But law is halting back just where that old civilization was; we want to change it.

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanaticism [112] about it. We are merely extending the area of liberty,--nothing else. We have made great progress. The law passed in your State at the last session of the legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You cannot stop with an inconsistent statute-book. A man is uneasy who is inconsistent. As old Fuller says, “You cannot make one side of the face laugh, and the other cry!” You cannot have one half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian; one half the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have granted that women may be hung, therefore you must grant that women may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed; therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation,--and this is, in fact, all that we claim — the whole of it.

Now I want to consider some of the objections that are made to this claim. Men say: “Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know enough; she has not sense enough to vote.” I take this idea of the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim for this reason, because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under republican institutions. The rule of despotism is that one class is made to protect the other; that the rich, the noble, the educated, are a sort of Probate Court, to take care of the poor, the ignorant, and the common classes. Our fathers got rid of all that. They knocked it in the head by the simple principle that no class is safe, unless government is so arranged that each class has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics. The Briton says to the poor man: “Be content! I am worth five millions and I will protect you;” America says: “Thank you, sir; I had rather take care of myself!” --and that is the essence [113] of democracy. [Applause.] It is the corner-stone of progress also, because, the moment you have admitted that poor, ignorant heart as an element of the government, able to mould your institutions, those five millions of dollars feel that their cradle is not safe and their life is in peril, unless that heart is bulwarked with education and informed with morality; selfishness dictates that wealth and education should do its utmost to educate poverty and hold up weakness,--and that is the philosophy of democratic institutions. [Applause.]

I am speaking in a republic which admits the principle that the poor are not to be protected by the rich, but to have the means of protecting themselves. So, too, with the ignorant; so, too, with races. The Irish are not to trust to the sense of justice in the Saxon; the German is not to trust to the native-born citizen; the Catholic is not to trust to the Protestant: but all sects, all classes, are to hold in their own hands the sceptre — the American sceptre — of the ballot, which protects each class. We claim it, therefore, for woman. The reply is that woman has not sense enough. If she has not, so much the more shame for your public schools,--educate her! If God did not give her mind enough, then you are brutes; for you say to her “Madam, you have sense enough to earn your own living,--don't come to us!” You make her earn her own bread, and if she has sense enough to do that, she has enough to say whether Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take one cent out of every hundred to pay for fire-works. When you hold her up in both hands and say: “Let me work for you! Don't move one of your dainty fingers! We will pour wealth into your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, all ye daughters of Eve!” --then you will be consistent in saying that woman has not sense enough to vote; but if she has sense enough to work, to depend [114] for her bread on her work, she has sense enough to vote.

Then, again, men say, “She is so different from man that God did not mean she should vote.” Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. [Applause.] One of two things is true: She is either exactly like man,--exactly like him, teetotally like him,--and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her as well as him; or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her. If she is like me, so much like me, that I know just as well how to vote for her as she knows how to vote for herself, then,--the very basis of the ballot-box being capacity,--she, being the same as I, has the same right to vote; and if she is so different that she has a different range of avocations and powers and capacities, then it is necessary she should go into the legislature, and with her own voice say what she wants, and write her wishes into statute-books, because nobody is able to interpret her. Choose which horn of the dilemma you please, for on the one or the other, the question of the right of woman to vote must hang.

It is exactly the question of races. You might as well say that the Irishman is not like the Saxon; that the Hindoo is not like the Englishman,--the world admits that they are not. Races are different; therefore, the German may well say, “You are a Yankee, with a soul curbed in a sixpence; you are not capable of voting for me. Your whole past and present are different from mine, and when I come to be an element in your civilization, I must shoot up my peaks into the highest land of legislative and civil life, because I want to be represented there as well as you.”

I do not think woman is identical with man. I think if she was, marriage would be a very stupid state. God made the races and sexes the complement one of the [115] other, and not the identical copy. I think the world, and literature itself, would be barren and insipid, if it was not for this exquisite variety of capacities and endowments with which God has variegated the human race. I think woman is different from man, and by reason of that very difference, she should be in legislative halls, and everywhere else, in order to protect herself.

But men say it would be very indelicate for woman to go to the ballot-box or sit in the legislature. Well, what would she see there? Why, she would see men. [Laughter.] She sees men now. In “Cranford village,” that sweet little sketch by Mrs. Gaskell, one of the characters says, “I know these men,--my father was a man.” [Laughter.] I think every woman can say the same. She meets men now, she could meet nothing but men at the ballot-box; or, if she meets brutes, they ought not to be there. [Applause.] Indelicate for her to go to the ballot-box!-but you may walk up and down Broadway any time from nine o'clock in the morning until nine at night, and you will find about equal numbers of men and women crowding that. thoroughfare, which is never still. You may get into an omnibus,--women are there, crowding us out sometimes. [Laughter.] You cannot go into a theatre without being crowded to death by two women to one man. If you go to the Lyceum, woman is there. I have stood on this very platform, and seen as many women as men before me, and one time, at least, when they could not have met any worse men at the ballotbox than they met in this hall. [Laughter and applause.] You may go to church, and you will find her facing men of all classes,--ignorant and wise, saints and sinners. I do not know anywhere that woman is not.

It is too late now to say that she cannot go to the [116] ballot-box. Go back to Turkey, and shut her up in a harem; go back to Greece, and shut her up in the private apartments of women; go back to the old Oriental phases of civilization, that never allowed woman's eyes to light a man's pathway, unless he owned her, and you are consistent; but you see, we have broken down that bulwark centuries ago. You know they used to let a man be hung in public, and said that it was for the sake of the example. They got ashamed of it, and banished the gallows to the jail-yard, and allowed only twelve men to witness an execution. It is too late to say that you hang men for the example, because the example you are ashamed to have public cannot be a wholesome example.

So it is with this question of woman; you have granted so much, that you have left yourself no ground to stand on. My dear, delicate friend, you are out of your sphere; you ought to be in Turkey. My dear, religiously, scrupulously fashionable, exquisitely anxious hearer, fearful lest your wife or daughter or sister shall be sullied by looking into your neighbors' faces at the ballot-box, you do not belong to the century that has ballot-boxes. You belong to the century of Tamerlane and Timour the Tartar; you belong to China, where the women have no feet, because it is not meant that they shall walk. You belong anywhere but in America; and if you want an answer, walk down Broadway and meet a hundred thousand petticoats, and they are a hundred thousand answers. For if woman can walk the streets, she can go to the ballot-box, and any reason of indelicacy that forbids the one, covers the other.

Woman will meet at the ballot-box the same men she sees in the lecture-room, the church, the theatre, the railroad cars, and the public streets. Long used [117] to respect woman's presence in those places, the vast majority of men obey there the laws of decency and good manners; and no husband or father thinks it necessary to prohibit entirely his wife or daughter's entrance to a theatre, church, car, or street, because some rare individual may chance to insult or offend her. Indeed, I may go further. The bully who knocks your hat over your eyes at the polling-booth would turn you out of his own house if you uttered a word disrespectful to his wife, mother, or daughter. He knows what is due to woman. Let woman go to the ballot-box, and the rudest man will in time be ashamed not to carry there his good manners. The keenest insult you can offer even to a rowdy,--the one he will resent the quickest,--is to hint that he does not know what is due to woman. In his own parlor he puts on his decency, and claims it of others. I will extend that parlor until it includes the polling-booth, when I give to both alike the restraining influence of the presence of woman.

All we ask is, that our civilization shall be made complete and consistent. We base our civilization on ideas. We say that representation and taxation go hand in hand. We say that Daniel Webster, no matter though his gifts be godlike, is entitled to no more ballots than the Irishman who pays nine shillings' poll-tax, and can just write his own name. We do not base our institutions on mental discipline, on culture; we base them on enough brains to be responsible to penal statutes. The man who is not enough of an idiot to be excused from the gallows, has sanity enough to be entitled to vote. That is the principle of Republicanism. Now, I claim, and always shall claim, that as long as woman has brains enough to be hung, she has brains enough to go to the ballot-box; and not until you strike her name off the tax-list, and excuse her from penal legislation, will [118] you, be justified in keeping her name off the list of voters:

Men say, “Why do you, come here? What good are you going to do,? You do nothing but talk.” Oh, yes, we have done a good deal beside talk! But suppose we had done nothing but talk? I saw a poor man the other day, and said he (speaking of a certain period in his life), “I felt very friendless and alone,--I had only God with me;” and he seemed to think that was not much. And so thirty millions of thinking, reading people are constantly throwing it in the teeth of reformers that they rely upon talk! What is talk? Why, it is the representative of brains. And what is the characteristic glory of the nineteenth century? That it is ruled by brains, and not by muscle; that rifles are gone by, and ideas have come in; and,. of course, in such an era, talk is the fountain-head of all things. But we have done a great deal. In the first place, you will meet dozens of men who say, “Oh, woman's right to property, the right of the wife to her own earnings, we grant that; we always thought that; we have had that idea for a dozen years.” I met: a man the other day in the cars, and we read the statute of your New York Legislature. “Why,” said he; “that is nothing; I have assented to that for these fifteen years.” All I could say to that was this,--“This agitation has either given you the idea, or it has given you the courage to utter it for nobody ever heard it from you until today.” These new-comers On our platform — very welcome they are!--must come under one guise or the other. This agitation, of which Mrs. Rose has sketched the history, has either given them their principles, or given them their lips. It has given them the thoughts, or the courage to utter the thoughts; and in either sense, it is a useful method, it is a beneficial result. [119] It has helped them, and it is beginning to help the community.

What do we toil for? Why, my friends, I do not care much whether a woman actually goes to the ballot-box and votes — that is a slight matter; and I shall not wait, either, to know whether every woman in this audience wants to vote. Some of you were saying to-day, in these very seats,--coming here out of mere curiosity, to see what certain fanatics could find to say,--“Why, I don't want any more rights; I have rights enough.” Many a lady whose husband is what he ought to be, feeling no want unsupplied, is ready to say, “I have all the rights I want.” So the daughter of Louis XVI., in the troublous times of 1791, when somebody told her that the people were starving in the streets of Paris, exclaimed, “What fools I would eat bread first” Thus, wealth, comfort, and ease say, “I have rights enough.” Nobody doubted it, Madam! But the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter of toil, whose earnings are filched from her by the rumdebts of a selfishness which the law makes to have a right over her, in the person of a husband. The question is not of you, it is of some friendless woman of twenty, standing at the door of the world, educated, capable, desirous of serving her time and her race, and saying, “Where shall I use these talents? How shall I earn bread?” And Orthodox society, cabined and cribbed in Saint Paul, cries out, “Go sew, jade! We have no other channel for you. Go to the needle, or wear yourself to death as a school-mistress.” We come here to endeavor to convince you, and so to shape our institutions that public opinion, following in the wake, shall be willing to open channels for the agreeable and profit, able occupation of women as much as for men, [120]

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 [121] that the upper classes,--education, wealth, aristocracy, conservatism,--the men that are in, ever yielded except to fear. I think the history of the race shows that the upper classes never granted a privilege to the lower out of love. As Jeremy Bentham says, “the upper classes never yielded a privilege without being bullied out of it.” When man rises in revolution, with the sword in his right hand, trembling wealth and conservatism say, “What do you want? Take it; but grant me my life.” The Duke of Tuscany, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has told us, swore to a dozen constitutions when the Tuscans stood armed in the streets of Florence, and he forgot them when the Austrians came in and took the rifles out of the Tuscan's hands. You must force the upper classes to do justice by physical or some other power. The age of physical power is gone, and we want to put ballots into the hands of women. We do not wait for women to ask for them. When 1 argue the Temperance Question, I do not go down to the drunkard and ask, “Do you want a prohibitory law?” I know what is good for him a great deal better than he does. [Applause.] When I meet an ignorant set of boys in the street, I don't say, “My poor little ignoramuses, would you like to have a system of public schools?” I know a great deal better what is good for them than they do. Our fathers established public schools before dunces asked for them.

What proves the clearest woman's need of the ballot? Why, the very inertness and ignorance which the lack of it has caused her. Like all other injustice and slavery, its worst effect is that it weakens, degrades, and darkens its victims, till they no longer realize the harm done them. Wasted on trifles, cramped by routine, lacking the stick and breadth which interest in great questions gives, many women grope or flutter on, ignorant of [122] the real cause that saddens their life, burdens their toil, starves their nature, and sows their path with thorns. Those whom circumstances have lifted to broader views must not wait for her request before they open to woman the advantages by which they have profited so much. Besides, we lose half our resources when we shut women out from beaten the influence of these elements of growth. God gives us the whole race with its varied endowments, man and woman, one the complement of the other, on which to base civilization. We starve ourselves by using in civil affairs only half — only one sex. I spoke a year ago of the stride literature made when women began to write and read. Politics will reap as great a gain when she enters its field.

I mean to get the ballot for women — why? Because Republicanism demands it; because the theory of our institutions demands it; because the moral health of the country demands it. What is our Western civilization in this State of New York, in this city of New York? A failure! As Humboldt well said, as Earl Gray has said in the House of Lords, “The experiment of American government is a failure to-day.” It cannot be denied. If this is the best that free institutions can do, then just as good, and a great deal better, can be done by despotism. The city of Paris to-day, with but one will in it, that of Napoleon, spends less, probably, than the city of New York spends, and the results are, comfort, safety, health, quiet, peace, beauty, civilization. New York, governed by brothels and grog-shops, spends twenty-five per cent more, and the results are, murder, drunkenness, rowdyism, unsafety, dirt, and disgrace! I think there is something to be said for despotism in that point of view. I weigh Paris, the representative of despotism, against New York, the representative of “Young America,” and New York kicks the beam. No [123] man can deny it. It is a failure on two grounds,--it is a failure, because the law ,of political economy has given to man good wages, and science has invented for him drink cheap as water, and held it to his lips, and said, “Make a brute of yourself!”

Intemperance, that gigantic foe of modern civilization, is the chasm in the forum which seems destined to swallow up the capacity of self-government. In the olden times, wine was dear, and only the upper classes could afford to get drunk. Around the shores of the Mediterranean, the stimulus of the stomach was no temptation; their climate tempted men on a different side. We are Saxons, our blood aches for a stimulus, by way of the stomach-appetite! Our idea of heaven is the skulls of our enemies, flowing over with rich wine. That is the blood that courses in our veins. In our streets, science pours out her drink like water. Political economy puts in every man's hand, by the labor of half a day, money enough to be drunk a week.

There is one temptation, dragging down the possibility of self-government into the pit of imbruted humanity, and on the other side, is that hideous problem of modern civilized life — prostitution — born of Orthodox scruples and aristocratic fastidiousness; born of that fastidious denial of the right of woman to choose her own work, and, like her brother, to satisfy her ambition, her love of luxury, her love of material gratifications, by fair wages for fair work. As long as you deny it, as long as the pulpit covers with its fastidious Orthodoxy this question from the consideration of the public, it is but a concealed brothel, although it calls itself an Orthodox pulpit. [Applause and hisses.] I know what I say; your hisses cannot change it. Go, clean out the Gehenna of New York! [Applause.] Go, sweep the Augean stable that makes Now York the lazar-house [124] of corruption! You know that on one side or the other of these temptations lies very much of the evil of modern civilized life. You know that before them, statesmanship folds its hands in despair. Here is a method by which to take care of at least one. Give men fair wages, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will disdain to steal. The way to prevent dishonesty is to let every man have a field for his work, and honest wages; the way to prevent licentiousness is to give to woman's capacity free play. Give to the higher powers activity, and they will choke down the animal. The mall who loves thinking, disdains to be the victim of appetite. It is a law of our nature. Give a hundred women honest wages for capacity and toil, and ninety-nine will disdain to win it by vice. That is the cure for licentiousness. [Applause.]

I wish to put into our civil life the element of woman's right to shape the laws, for all our social life copies largely from the statute-book. Let woman dictate at the Capital, let her say to Wall Street, “My votes on finance are to make stocks rise and fall;” and Wall Street will say to Columbia College, “Open your classes to woman; it needs be that she should learn.” The moment you give her the ballot, you take bonds of wealth and fashion and conservatism, that they will educate this power which is holding their interest in ;s right hand. I want to spike the gun of selfishness; or rather, I want to double-shot the cannon of selfishness. Let Wall Street say, “Look you! whether the New York Central stock shall have a toll placed upon it, whether my million shares shall be worth sixty cents in the market or eighty, depends upon whether certain women up there at Albany know the laws of trade and the secrets of political economy,” --and Wall Street will say, “Get out of the way, Dr. Adams! Absent yourself Dr. Spring! We don't care for Jewish prejudices; these [125] women must have education!” [Loud applause.] Show me the necessity in civil life, and I will find you forty thousand pulpits that will say Saint Paul meant just that. [Renewed applause.] Now, I am Orthodox; I believe in the Bible; I reverence Saint Paul; I believe his was the most masterly intellect that God ever gave to the race; I believe he was the connecting link, the bridge, by which the Asiatic and European mind were joined; I believe that Plato ministers at his feet,--but after all he was a man, and not God. [Applause.] He was limited, and liable to mistake. You cannot anchor this Western continent to the Jewish footstool of Saint Paul; and after all, that is the difficulty,--religious prejudice. It is not the fashion,--we shall beat it; it is not the fastidiousness of the exquisite,--we shall smother it; it is the religious prejudice, borrowed from a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. That is the real Gibraltar with which we are to grapple, and my argument with that is simply this,--you left it when you founded a republic; you left it when you inaugurated Western civilization; we must grow out of one root.

I congratulate you, as friends of this cause, on the progress of the last twelve months. You know that when you look at a barometer on a common sunshiny day, you must furnish yourself with an infinitesimal point of brass, and a machinery of delicate wheels to move it a small atom of space, sufficient to measure the changes of the quicksilver. But when you are in the East India seas, and — the monsoon is about to blow, or the tempest is about to sweep the surface of the waters, the barometer will jump an inch, or fall down an inch, according as the change is to be. You need no machinery then, when a storm is coming that will lift your [126] ship out of the very sea itself. I think, that in the twenty years that have gone by, we have had the little, infinitesimally minute changes of the barometer, but the New York Legislature has risen a full inch in the moral barometer the last twelve months. [Applause.] It is a proof that the monsoon is coming that will lift the old conservative ship, carrying the idea that woman is a drudge and a slave, out of the waters, and dash her into fragments on the surface of our democratic sea. In a few years more, I do not know but we shall disband, and watch these women to the ballotbox, to see that they do their duty. [Applause.] You will have your State Constitution to change in five or six years. Use such meetings as these, and perhaps the Empire State will earn its title by inaugurating the great movement becoming democratic and Saxon civilization, by throwing open civil life to woman. I hope it may be so. Let us go out and labor that it shall be so.

...

Let me, in closing, show you by one single anecdote, how mean a thing a man can be. You have heard of Mrs. Norton, “the woman Byron,” as critics call her, the grand-daughter of Sheridan, and the one on whose shoulders his mantle has rested,--a genius by right of inheritance and by God's own gift. Perhaps you may remember that when the Tories wanted to break down the reform administration of Lord Melbourne, they brought her husband to feign to believe his wife unfaithful, and to sue her before a jury. He did so, brought an action, and an English jury said she was innocent; and his own counsel has since admitted in writing, under his own signature, that during the time he prosecuted that trial, the Honorable Mr. Norton (for so he is in the Herald's Book), confessed all the time that he did not believe a word against his wife, and knew she was innocent. [127] She is a writer; the profits of her books, by the law of England, belong to her husband. She has not lived with him — of course not, for she is a woman!-since that trial; but the brute goes every six months to John Murray, and eats the profits of the brain of the wife whom he tried to disgrace, [Loud cries of “Shame, shame!” ] And the law of England says it is right; the Orthodox pulpit says, “If you change it, it will be the pulling down of the stars and Saint Paul.” I do not believe that the Honorable Mr. Norton is half as near to the mind of Saint Paul as the Honorable Mrs; Norton. I believe, therefore, in woman having the right to her brain, to her hands, to her toil, to her ballot. “The tools to him that can use them--” and let God settle the rest. If He made it just that we should have democratic institutions, then he made it just that everybody who is to suffer under the law should have a voice it making it; and if it is indelicate for women to vote, then let Him stop making women [applause and laughter], because republicanism and such women are inconsistent. I say it reverently; and I only say it to show you the absurdity. Why, my dear man and woman, we are not to help God govern the world by telling lies! He can take care of it himself. If He made it just, you may be certain that He saw to it that it should be delicate; and you need not insert your little tiny roots of fastidious delicacy into the great giant rifts of God's world,--they are only in the way. [Applause.]