I suppose women feel in relation to men as ’tis said geniuses feel among energetic workers, that, though overlooked and thrust aside in the press, they outsee all these noisy masters: and we, in the presence of sensible women, feel overlooked, judged,—and sentenced. They are better scholars than we at school, and the reason why they are not better than we twenty years later may be because men can turn their reading to account in the professions, and women are excluded from the professions. These traits have always characterized women. We are a little vain of our women, as if we had invented them. I think we exaggerate the effect of Greek, Roman and even Oriental institutions on the character of woman. Superior women are rare anywhere, as superior men are. But the anecdotes of every country give like portraits of womanhood, and every country in its Roll of Honor has as many women as men. The high sentiment of women appears in the Hebrew, the Hindoo; in Greek women in Homer, in the tragedies, and Roman women in the histories. Their distinctive traits, grace, vivacity, and surer moral sentiment, their self-sacrifice, their courage and endurance, have in every nation found respect and admiration. Her gifts make woman the refiner and civilizer of her mate. Civilization is her work. Man is rude and bearish in colleges, in mines, in ships, because there is no woman. Let good women go passengers in the ship, and the manners at once are mended; in schools, in hospitals, in the prairie, in California, she brings the same reform.... Her activity in putting an end to Slavery; and in serving the hospitals of the Sanitary Commission in the war, and in the labors of the Freedman’s Bureau, have opened her eyes to larger rights and duties. She claims now her full rights of all kinds,—to education, to employment, to equal laws of property. Well, now in this country we are suffering much and fearing more from the abuse of the ballot and from fraudulent and purchased votes. And now, at the moment when committees are investigating and reporting the election frauds, woman asks for her vote. It is the remedy at the hour of need. She is to purify and civilize the voting, as she has the schools, the hospitals and the drawing-rooms. For, to grant her request, you must remove the polls from the tavern and rum-shop, and build noble edifices worthy of the State, whose halls shall afford her every security for deliberate and sovereign action.