He was a friend of woman suffrage. On the occasion of a presentation of a petition from twenty thousand Massachusetts women, though four thousand of them had petitioned against the proposed measure, he made a strong and earnest plea for granting the ballot to women. Among other things he said: "No fire ever yet was lighted that could reduce to ashes an eternal truth." He believed that women, as well as men, form society, and "the people, who were the true source, under God, of all authority on earth," were not made up wholly of one sex. He quoted from that pamphlet, "De Jure Regni," published by George Buchanan in 1556, which was burned by the hangman in St. Paul's churchyard,--where so many Bibles and other good books have been burned,--which declared that "the will of the people is the only legitimate source of power." He declared that the "lofty ideal of republicanism is the Sermon on the Mount." Of women, he said, "Wherever they have walked, there has been less of hell and more of heaven." After an ex-mayor, in his speech, had referred to Carleton's bill, which changed the appointing power of the police from the Mayor and Common Council, and, by putting it in the hands of the Governor and Executive Council, placed it on the same foundation as the judiciary, as "that infamous police law," Carleton said: "Make a note of it, statesmen of the future. Write it down in your memoranda, politicians who indulge the expectation that you can ride into power on the vices of society,--that moral forces are marshalling as never before in the history of the human race, and that the women of this country are beginning to wield them to shape legislation on all great moral questions. Refreshing as perfume-laden breezes from the celestial plains were the words of encouragement and sympathy that came to me from mothers in Berkshire, from the Cape, from all over the Commonwealth." In 1890, in the Massachusetts Senate, there was an attempt made to divide the town of Beverly. Into this, as into so many of the pleasant towns, villages, and rural districts around Boston, wealthy Bostonians had come and built luxurious houses upon the land which they had bought. Not content with being citizens in the place where they were newcomers,--thus securing release from heavier taxes in Boston, where they lived in winter,--they wished to separate themselves, in a most un-American and un-democratic manner, from the older inhabitants and "common" people, and to make a new settlement with a separate local government for those who formed a particular class living in luxury. Carleton, hostile to the sordid and unsocial spirit lurking in the bill, vigorously opposed the attempted mutilation of an old historic town, and the isolation of "Beverly Farms." He opposed it, because it would be a bad precedent, and one in favor of class separation and class distinction. His speech embodies a masterly historical sketch of the town form of government. CHAPTER XXVI.