You see where you are coming to, don't you? Calling yourself a lady
doesn't elect you; that is what you were going to say; and you saw that
if you said it you were going to run right up against another difference
that you hadn't thought of: to-wit, Whose right is it to do the electing?
Over there, twenty thousand people in a million elect themselves
gentlemen and ladies, and the nine hundred and eighty thousand accept
that decree and swallow the affront which it puts upon them. Why, if
they didn't accept it, it wouldn't be an election, it would be a dead
letter and have no force at all. Over here the twenty thousand would-be
exclusives come up to the polls and vote themselves to be ladies and
gentlemen. But the thing doesn't stop there. The nine hundred and
eighty thousand come and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen too,
and that elects the whole nation. Since the whole million vote
themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that
election. It does make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about
it; while over yonder the inequality, (by decree of the infinitely
feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute--as real
and absolute as our equality.
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