“I say wimmen’s brains are too weak to grasp public matters. They have remarkable intuitions I grant. A woman’s insight or instinct or whatever you may term it, will, I grant, fly over a mountain and discover what is on the other side of it, while a man is gettin’ his gunpowder ready to make a tunnel through it. But they are not logical, they have not the firm grasp of mind, the clear comprehension requisite to a voter.”
Says I, “Horace, which has the firmest grasp--the clearest comprehension, a earnest intellegent christian woman, or a drunken Irishman?” Says I, “Understand me Horace, I don’t ask which would sell thier votes at the best lay, or vote the most times in one day--I dare say the man would get ahead of the woman in these respects, bein’ naturally more of a speculator--and also bein’ in practice. You know practice makes perfect. I don’t ask you this. But I ask you and I want you to answer me Horace, which would be in the best condition for votin’, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gettin’ up off of her religious knees in the mornin’ after family prayers, and walkin’--with the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other--coolly and sensibly to the pole, or Patrick oh Flanegan comin’ out of a drunken wake, and staggerin’ up against the pole with a whisky bottle in one hand and a club in the other, when he didn’t know nothin’ in the first place, and then had lost half or 3 quarters of that, in the liquer some clear minded, logical man give him, for votin’ a few dozen times for him?”
At this question Horace quailed a very little. But it was not the quail of a weak man, there was principle in that quail, and a determination to argue to the end, which is one of the charicterestics of that great and good man. She that was Samantha Smith also possesses some of this spirit.
“Set down, Josiah Allen’s wife and don’t fatigue yourself too much,” says Horace, for almost carried away by my emotions, I had riz’ up and stood on my feet agin.
And he went on, “You put the case in a very strong light Josiah Allen’s wife. That is one of the peculiar weaknesses of your sect. You don’t possess sufficient moderation. You exaggerate too much.”
Says I, “publishin’ a daily paper for 20 years, has a tendency to make any man a good judge of exaggeration, and if you see by my symptoms that I have got it, I haint a goin’ to deny it. But you haint answered my question yet Horace.”