years they have been voting in these bodies; voting to send laymen here
to legislate; to send laymen to the General Conference to elect Bishops
and Editors and Book Agents and Secretaries. They come to where votes
count in making up this body; they have been voting sixteen years, and
only now, when the logical result of the right of suffrage that the
General Conference gave to women appears and confronts us by women
coming here to vote as delegates, do we rise up and protest. I believe
that it is at the wrong time that the protest comes. It should have come
when the right to vote was granted to women in the Church. It is sixteen
years too late, and as was very wisely said by Dr. Potts, the objection
comes not so much from the Constitution of the Church as from the
"constitution of the men," who challenge these women.
Now, sir, another parallel. You take the United States Government just
after the war, when the colored people of the South, the freedmen of our
land, unable to take care of themselves, their friends, that had fought
the battles of the war, in Congress determined that they should be
protected, if no longer by bayonets and cannon, that they should
be protected by placing the ballot in their hands, and the ballot was
placed in the hands of the freedman of the South by the action of the
National Congress, Congress submitting a constitutional amendment to the
legislatures of the States; and when enough of them had voted in favor
of it, and the President had signed the bill, it became an amendment to
the Constitution of the United States, granting to the people of the
South, who had been disfranchised, the right of suffrage.
Now, what does the right of suffrage do? It carries with it the right
to hold office. Where women have the privileges of voting on the school
question, they are granted the privilege of being school directors,
holding the office of superintendents, and the restriction on them stops
at that point under statute law. If you go a little further you will
find that when the freedmen were enfranchised, and they sent men of
their own color to the House of Representatives, did that body say
"stop!" "we protest, you cannot come in because of illegality"? No. They
were admitted on the face of their credentials because they had first
been granted the right of suffrage. When men of their color went to the
United States Senate and submitted their credentials, they were not
protested against, but they were admitted as members of the United
States Senate on the face of their credentials. And why? Because
the right of suffrage granted to the freedmen of the South under a
constitutional amendment of the nation, carried with it the right of
the men whom we fought to free, and did free, in an awful war, to hold
office in the nation. Now, sir, you must interpret the law somewhat by
the spirit of the times in which you live. That is a mistaken notion
to say that you must always go to the men that made the law to get the
interpretation of it. If that were true, would it not always be wise
for legislators to give their affidavits and place on file their
interpretation of the law they had confirmed, and placed on the statute
books? There are legal gentlemen in this body who will tell you that it
goes for very little when you come to interpret law. And yet you will
find this to be true, that a law must be interpreted somewhat by the
spirit of the time in which you live. Why, twenty years ago, when the
General Conference handed the question of lay delegation down to the
Annual Conferences, and the members of our Church, there was not a
woman practising law in the Supreme Court of the United States. Go back
through the history of jurisprudence of this country and in England, and
you will find that it had never been known that a woman practised law in
the Supreme Court of this country or England. But to-day women have been
admitted to practise law in the Supreme Court of the United States. No