Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous. The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities, must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature, poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions. Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart, sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by you as out of place in affairs of state, are the very ones of which you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your councils. A model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where except within the family. The ready helpfulness and equal attention to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities--in great measure due to the subordination of women--which in many ways interfere with efforts for the good of the whole. From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training, and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently less corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.