“The fair Priscilla may have mistaken my cloth. I am a man, and I hope a gentleman. I love society, and find an exquisite charm in the social intercourse of cultivated men and women. That charm would vanish were they to meet and converse, not as men and women, gentlemen and ladies, but as simple human beings. Could you carry out your doctrine, your sex would, I fear, be the first to suffer from it.” “Perhaps they would,” said Priscilla; “but it is woman’s lot to suffer, and she was born to redeem the race by her private sorrows. She will not shrink from the sacrifice. You need her at the polls, in the legislative halls, in the executive chair, on the judge’s bench, as well as in the saloon, to give purity and elevation to your affections, disinterestedness and courage to your conduct.” “Rather let her be present to infuse noble qualities into our hearts in childhood, and to cherish and invigorate them in our manhood,” added Mr. Merton. “Let her mission be by a sweet, quiet, and gentle influence to form us from our infancy for lofty and heroic deeds, and let it be ours to do them.” “I do not like this discussion at all,” broke in Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Hobbs, a thorough-going radical, with an unshaved and unwashen face, long, lank, uncombed hair, and a gray, patched frock coat, leather pantaloons, a red waistcoat, and a red bandanna handkerchief tied round his neck for a cravat. “The world can never be reformed by the instrumentality of government, whether in the hands of man or woman. The curse of the world is that it has been governed too much. That is the best government that governs least, and a better is that which governs none at all. We want no government, least of all a government made up of female politicians and intriguers. There never yet was a great crime or a great iniquity, but a woman had a hand in it. The devil, when he would ruin mankind, always begins by seducing woman, and making her his accomplice. We must get rid of all government, break down church and state, sweep away religion and politics, and exterminate all priests and politicians, whether in pantaloons or petticoats, in broadcloth or homespun, and bring back that state of things which was in Judea, ‘when there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes.’”