And I went on more fiery than I had went, as I thought, why Babe is
old enough now, and Snow will be in a little while, to lay their sweet
little lives down under this Jugernut built up by the vile passions of
men, and goin’ ahead of Isaac, lay themselves on the altar, take their
own lives, and build up the fire to consume ’em.
“The idee of law-makers who call themselves wise makin’ such laws as
these!”
He stopped a handlin’ that watch-chain of hisen, his head drooped,
his hands dropped demutely into his lap. He murmured sunthin’ almost
mechanically about “the law being on the statute-book.”
“I know it is,” sez I. “I know the law is there. But let wimmen have
a chance to vote; let a few mothers and grandmothers get holt of that
statute-book, and see where that law would be.”
Sez I eloquently, “No spring cleanin’ and scourin’ wuz ever done by
females so thorough as they would cleanse out them old law books and
let a little of God’s purity and justice shine into their musty old
pages.”
Sez I, “You made a great ado about Raymond losin’ that locket because
it wuz precious with the memories of your lost wife—you treasured
it as your most dear possession because it held a lock of her hair,
because she gin it to you, and her love and tenderness seemed shinin’
out of every jewel in it.
“But how would it be with a child that a mother left as a souvenir of
her deathless love, a part of her own life left to a broken-hearted
husband? Would a man who held such a child, such a little daughter to
his achin’ heart, do and make a law by which the child could be lost
and ruined forever?
“No; the men that make these laws make ’em for other folks’es children,
not their own. It is other fathers’ girls that they doom to ruin. When
they license shameful houses it hain’t their own pretty daughters that
they picture under the infamus ruffs, despised playthings for brutality
and lust. No; it is some other parents’ daughters.”
[Illustration: “MY TONE RIZ UP.”]
My tone had been awful eloquent and riz up, for nobody but the Lord
knew how deeply I felt all I had said, and more than I ever could say
on the subject.
And I spoze I looked lofty and noble in my mean—I spoze so.
Anyway, Senator Coleman quailed to a extent that I hardly ever see
quailed in my hull life, and I have seen lots of quailin’ in my day.
And I pressed home the charge.
Sez I, “You say this law wuz made for girls; but what if this boy that
your sweet Kate Fairfax left you had happened to be a girl, and had gin
away all that makes life worth living, how would you have felt then,
Senator Coleman?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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