Mr. Blair then demonstrated the intellectual ability of the woman of the present day, proving in this respect her capacity and fitness to vote. He quoted from the minority report of the Senate Committee, which had been submitted by Senators Brown and Cockrell, saying: It proceeds to show that both man and woman are designed for a higher final estate--to-wit, that of matrimony. It seems to be conceded that man is just as well fitted for matrimony as woman herself, and the whole subject is illuminated with certain botanical lore about stamens and pistils, which, however relevant to matrimony, does not prove that woman should not vote unless at the same time it proves that man should not vote. And certainly it can not apply to those women, any more than to those men, whose highest and final estate never is merged in the family relation at all.... The right to vote is the great primitive right in which all freedom originates and culminates. It is the right from which all others spring, in which they merge, and without which they fall whenever assailed. This right makes all the difference between government by and with the consent of the governed, and government without and against the consent of the governed; and that is the difference between freedom and slavery. If the right to vote be not that difference, what is? If either sex as a class can dispense with the right to vote, then take it from the strong and do not longer rob the weak of their defense for the benefit of the strong. But it is impossible to conceive of the suffrage as a right dependent at all upon such an irrelevant condition as sex. It is an individual, a personal right, and if withheld by reason of sex it is a moral robbery. It is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise this high function in the State because of motherhood. On the contrary, if any woman has a motive more than another person, man or woman, to secure the enactment and enforcement of good laws, it is the mother, who, besides her own life, person and property--to the protection of which the ballot is as essential as to those of man--has her little contingent of immortal beings to conduct safely to the portals of active life through all the snares and pitfalls woven around them by bad men and bad laws, and to prepare rightly for the discharge of all the duties of their day and generation, including, if boys, the exercise of the very right denied to their mother.