Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
But some people say: "Would you allow a woman to vote?" Yes, if she
wants to; that is her business, not mine. If a woman wants to vote, I
am too much of a gentleman to say she shall not. But, they say, woman
has not sense enough to vote. It don't take much. But it seems to me
there are some questions, as for instance, the question of peace or
war, that a woman should be allowed to vote upon. A woman that has
sons to be offered on the altar of that Moloch, it seems to me that
such a woman should have as much right to vote upon the question of
peace and war as some thrice-besotted sot that reels to the ballot box
and deposits his vote for war. But if women have been slaves, what
shall we say of the little children, born in the sub-cellars, children
of poverty, children of crime, children of wealth, children that are
afraid when they hear their names pronounced by the lips of their
mother, children that cower in fear when they hear the footsteps of
their brutal father, the flotsam and jetsam upon the rude sea of life,
my heart goes out to them one and all.
Children have all the rights that we have and one more, and that is to
be protected. Treat your children in that way. Suppose your child
tells a lie. Don't pretend that the whole world is going into
bankruptcy. Don't pretend that that is the first lie ever told. Tell
them, like an honest man, that you have told hundreds of lies yourself,
and tell the dear little darling that it is not the best way; that it
soils the soul. Think of the man that deals in stocks whipping his
children for putting false rumors afloat! Think of an orthodox
minister whipping his own flesh and blood, for not telling all it
thinks! Think of that! Think of a lawyer for beating his child for
avoiding the truth! when the old man makes about half his living that
way. A lie is born of weakness on one side and tyranny on the other.
That is what it is. Think of a great big man coming at a little bit of
a child with a club in his hand! What is the little darling to do?
Lie, of course. I think that mother Nature put that ingenuity into the
mind of the child, when attacked by a parent, to throw up a little
breastwork in the shape of a lie to defend itself. When a great
general wins a battle by what they call strategy, we build monuments to
him. What is strategy? Lies. Suppose a man as much larger than we are
as we are larger than a child five years of age, should come at us with
a liberty pole in his hand, and in tones of thunder want to know "who
broke that plate," there isn't one of us, not excepting myself, that
wouldn't swear that we never had seen that plate in our lives, or that
it was cracked when we got it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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