That the division of labor was already taking place, was obvious enough to her: so she claimed, in advance, the right of suffrage. Society was already prepared to make this claim, but only discovered its readiness as it listened to her enthusiastic song. Like Deborah, our friend struck her cymbals; and, when the heart of the people shouted consent, they "made her a judge over them." Although it was doubtless owing to many older causes, it seemed as if her statement of the "great lawsuit" in 1844 led to the first Woman's Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848; and, in 1850, the National Woman's-rights Association began the yearly work in which it has ever since persevered. Man, as well as woman, has been forced to respect this work, moved by the moral destitution in the lowest, and the profane inanity in the highest, ranks of life, which is the result of our social depravity. _Profane inanity_, I repeat; for every helpless woman is a living, intolerable blasphemy against the Most High. Not more a blasphemy than every helpless man; but society neither expects, defends, nor provides for, helpless _men_. It is only the helpless woman who is expected and approved. Often do we hear it said, that no law forbids American women to _work_. Neither, it has been responded, is there any _law_ which forbids Chinese women to _walk_; but the careful ligatures, so closely pressed by unsuspecting mothers about those tender feet, do not do their work more surely than the inevitable restrictions of society. In summing up this constantly accruing list of influences and changes, I must again direct your attention to the fact, that, from the earliest dawn of modern civilization, women have been, in some nations at least, invested with political power. The mock-marriage, by which the woman's entailed suffrage served a fraudulent purpose; the abbesses called to Parliament in right of abbey-lands, the permission accorded to the eighty-one women of Upsal, the position of the French "Dames de la Halle," the female stockholders in the East-India Company, that one persistent female property-holder in Nova Scotia, the fifty-dollar proclamation-money in New Jersey,--all indicate that there never _has_ been, and never _will_ be, any serious difficulty about woman's voting in any age or any country where the right to vote depends upon the possession of property, and where she herself professes to desire it. Understand, then, that the abstract right to vote is not the question for you to consider: that was settled some hundreds of years ago. The practical question for American men to put to themselves is, whether their own democratic experiment is a failure. Will you go back to the property basis for your own franchise? or do you still profess to believe, that man--as man, as child of God--has a right to reign, which does not depend upon broad doubloons or broad acres? And, if man has this right upon a simple human ground, how can you deny it to woman?