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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11114 ***
+
+                       DEBATE
+                         ON
+                   WOMAN SUFFRAGE
+
+
+                       IN THE
+             SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES,
+              2D SESSION, 49TH CONGRESS,
+        DECEMBER 8, 1886, AND JANUARY 23, 1887,
+
+
+                         BY
+
+        SENATORS H.W. BLAIR, J.E. BROWN, J.N. DOLPH,
+             G.G. VEST, AND GEO. F. HOAR.
+
+
+                     WASHINGTON.
+                        1887.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Wednesday, December 8, 1886._
+
+On the joint resolution (S.R. 5) proposing an amendment to the
+Constitution of the United States extending the right of suffrage to
+women.
+
+Mr. BLAIR said:
+
+Mr. PRESIDENT: I ask the Senate to proceed to the consideration of
+Order of Business 122, being the joint resolution (S.R. 5) proposing
+an amendment to the Constitution of the United States extending the
+right of suffrage to women.
+
+The motion was agreed to.
+
+The PRESIDENT _pro tempore_. The joint resolution will be read.
+
+The Chief Clerk read as follows:
+
+    Joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the
+    United States extending the right of suffrage to women.
+
+    _Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United
+    States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House
+    concurring therein)_, That the following article be proposed to
+    the Legislatures of the several States as an amendment to the
+    Constitution of the United States; which, when ratified by
+    three-fourths of the said Legislatures, shall be valid as part of
+    said Constitution, namely:
+
+    ARTICLE--.
+
+    SECTION 1. The rights of citizens of the United States to vote
+    shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
+    State on account of sex.
+
+    SEC. 2. The Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation,
+    to enforce the provisions of this article.
+
+Mr. BLAIR. Mr. President, the question before the Senate is this:
+Shall a joint resolution providing for an amendment of the national
+Constitution, so that the right of citizens of the United States to
+vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by
+any State, on account of sex, and that Congress shall have power to
+enforce the article, be submitted to the Legislatures of the several
+States for ratification or rejection?
+
+The answer to this question does not depend necessarily upon the
+reply to that other question, whether women ought to be permitted
+to exercise the right or privilege of suffrage as do men. The
+Legislatures of the several States must decide this in ratifying or
+rejecting the proposed amendment.
+
+Upon solemn occasions concerning grave public affairs, and when large
+numbers of the citizens of the country desire to test the sentiments
+of the people upon an amendment of the organic law in the manner
+provided to be done by the provisions of that law, it may well become
+the duty of Congress to submit the proposition to the amending power,
+which is the same as that which created the original instrument
+itself--the people of the several States.
+
+It can hardly be claimed that two-thirds of each branch of Congress
+must necessarily be convinced that the Constitution should be amended
+as proposed in the joint resolution to be submitted before it has
+discretion to submit the same to the judgment of the States. Any
+citizen has the right to petition or, through his representative, to
+bring in his bill for redress of grievances, or to promote the public
+good by legislation; and it can hardly be maintained that, before
+any citizen or large body of citizens shall have the privilege of
+introducing a bill to the great legislative tribunal, which alone has
+primary jurisdiction of the organic law and power to amend or change
+it, the Congress, which under the Constitution is simply the moving or
+initiating power, must by a two-thirds vote approve the proposition
+at issue before its discussion shall be permitted in the forum of the
+States. To hold such a doctrine would be contrary to all our ideas of
+free discussion, and to lock up the institutions and the interests of
+a great and progressive people in fetters of brass.
+
+It is only essential that two-thirds of each House of the Congress
+shall deem it necessary for the public good, that the amendment
+be proposed to the States for their action. But two-thirds of the
+Congress will hardly consider it "necessary" to submit a joint
+resolution proposing an amendment of the National Constitution to
+the States for consideration, unless the subject matter be of grave
+importance, with strong reasons in its favor, and a large support
+already developed among the people themselves.
+
+If there be any principle upon which our form of government is
+founded, and wherein it is different from aristocracies, monarchies,
+and despotisms, that principle is this:
+
+Every human being of mature powers, not disqualified by ignorance,
+vice or crime, is the equal of and is entitled to all the rights and
+privileges which belong to any other such human being under the law.
+
+The independence, equality, and dignity of all human souls is the
+fundamental assertion of those who believe in what we call human
+freedom. This principle will hardly be denied by any one, even by
+those who oppose the adoption of the resolution. But we are informed
+that infants, idiots, and women are represented by men. This cannot
+reasonably be claimed unless it be first shown that the consent of
+these classes has been given to such representation, or that they
+lack the capacity to consent. But the exclusion of these classes from
+participation in the Government deprives them of the power of assent
+to representation even when they possess the requisite ability; and to
+say there can be representation which does not presuppose consent
+or authority on the part of the principal who is represented is to
+confound all reason and to assert in substance that all actual power,
+whether despotic or otherwise, is representative, and therefore free.
+In this sense the Czar represents his whole people, just as voting men
+represent women who do not vote at all.
+
+True it is that the voting men, by excluding women and other classes
+from the suffrage, by that act charge themselves with the trust of
+administering justice to all, even as the monarch whose power is based
+upon force is bound to rule uprightly. But if it be true that "all
+just government is founded upon the consent of the governed," then
+the government of woman by man, without her consent, given in her
+sovereign capacity, if indeed she be an intelligent creature, and
+provided she be competent to exercise the power of suffrage, which is
+the sovereignty, even if that government be wise and just in itself,
+is a violation of natural right and an enforcement of servitude and
+slavery against her on the part of man. If woman, like the infant
+or the defective classes, be incapable of self-government, then
+republican society may exclude her from all participation in the
+enactment and enforcement of the laws under which she lives. But in
+that case, like the infant and the fool and the unconsenting subject
+of tyrannical forms of government, she is ruled and not represented by
+man.
+
+Thus much I desire to say in the beginning in reply to the broad
+assumption of those who deny women the suffrage by saying that they
+are already represented by their fathers, their husbands, their
+brothers, and their sons, or to state the proposition in its only
+proper form, that woman whose assent can only be given by an exercise
+of sovereignty on her part is represented by man who denies and by
+virtue of power and possession refuses to her the exercise of the
+suffrage whereby that representation can be made valid.
+
+The claim, then, of the minority of the committee that woman is
+represented by the other sex is not well founded, and is based upon
+the same assumption of power which lies at the base of all government
+anti-republican in form. It can not be claimed that she is as a free
+being already represented, for she can only be represented according
+to her will by the exercise of her will through the suffrage itself.
+
+As already observed, the exclusion of woman from the suffrage under
+our form of government can be justified upon proof, and only upon
+proof, that by reason of her sex she is incompetent to exercise that
+power. This is a question of fact.
+
+The common ground upon which all agree may be stated thus: All males
+having certain qualifications are in reason and in law entitled to
+vote. Those qualifications affect either the body or the mind or both.
+
+First, the attainment of a certain age. The age in itself is not
+material, but maturity of mental and moral development is material,
+soundness of body in itself not being essential, and want of it alone
+never working forfeiture of the right, although it may prevent its
+exercise.
+
+Age as a qualification for suffrage is by no means to be confounded
+with age as a qualification for service in war. Society has well
+established the distinction, and that one has no relation whatever to
+the other; the one having reference to physical prowess, while the
+other relates only to the mental and moral state. This is shown by the
+ages fixed by law for these qualifications, that of eighteen years
+being fixed as the commencement of the term of presumed fitness
+for military service, and forty-five years as the period of its
+termination; while the age of presumed fitness for the suffrage, which
+requires no physical superiority certainly, is set at twenty-one
+years, when still greater strength of body has been attained than
+at the period when liability to the dangers and hardships of war
+commences; and there are at least three millions more male voters in
+our country than of the population liable by law to the performance of
+military duty. It is still further to be observed, that the right of
+suffrage continues as long as the mind lasts, while ordinary liability
+to military service ceases at a period when the physical powers,
+though still strong, are beginning to wane. The truth is, that there
+is no legal or natural connection between the right or liability to
+fight and the right to vote.
+
+The right to fight may be exercised voluntarily or the liability to
+fight may be enforced by the community whenever there is an invasion
+of right, and the extent to which the physical forces of society
+may be called upon in self-defense or in justifiable revolution is
+measured not by age or sex, but by necessity, and may go so far as to
+call into the field old men and women and the last vestige of physical
+force. It can not be claimed that woman has no right to vote because
+she is not liable to fight, for she is so liable, and the freest
+government on the face of the earth has the reserved power under the
+call of necessity to place her in the forefront of battle itself, and
+more than this, woman has the right, and often has exercised it, to go
+there.
+
+If any one could question the existence of this reserved power of
+society to call the force of woman to the common defense, either in
+the hospital or the field, it would be woman, who has been deprived of
+participation in the government and in shaping the public policy which
+has resulted in dire emergency to the state. But in all times, and
+under all forms of government and of social existence, woman has given
+her body and her soul to the common defense.
+
+The qualification of age, then, is imposed for the purpose of securing
+mental and moral fitness for the suffrage on the part of those who
+exercise it. It has no relation to the possession of physical powers
+at all.
+
+All other qualifications imposed upon male citizens, save only that of
+their sex, as prerequisites to the exercise of suffrage have the same
+objects in view, and can have no other.
+
+The property qualification is, to my mind, an invasion of natural
+right, which elevates mere property to an equality with life and
+personal liberty, and ought never to be imposed upon the suffrage.
+But, however that may be, its application or removal has no relation
+to sex, and its only object is to secure the exercise of the
+suffrage under a stronger sense of obligation and responsibility--a
+qualification, be it observed, of no consequence save as it influences
+the mind of the voter in the exercise of his right.
+
+The same is true of the qualifications of sanity, education, and
+obedience to the laws, which exclude dementia, ignorance, and
+crime from participation in the sovereignty. Every condition or
+qualification imposed upon the exercise of the suffrage by the citizen
+save only sex has for its only object or possible justification
+the possession of mental and moral fitness, and has no relation to
+physical power.
+
+The question then arises why is the qualification of masculinity
+required at all?
+
+The distinction between human beings by reason of sex is a physical
+distinction. The soul is of no sex. If there be a distinction of soul
+by reason of the physical difference, or accompanying that physical
+difference, woman is the superior of man in mental and moral
+qualities. In proof of this see the report of the minority and all the
+eulogiums of woman pronounced by those who, like the serpent of old,
+would flatter her vanity that they may continue to wield her power.
+
+I repeat it, that the soul is of no sex, and that sex is, so far as
+the possession and exercise of human rights and powers are concerned,
+but a physical property, in which the female is just as important as
+the male, and the possessor thereof under just as great need of power
+in the organization and management of society and the government of
+society as man; and if there be a difference, she, by reason of her
+average physical inferiority, is really protected, and ought to be
+protected, by a superior mental and moral fitness to give direction to
+the course of society and the policy of the state. If, then, there be
+a distinction between the souls of human beings resulting from sex, I
+claim that, by the report of the minority and the universal testimony
+of all men, woman is better fitted for the exercise of the suffrage
+than man.
+
+It is claimed by some that the suffrage is an inherent natural right,
+and by others that it is merely a privilege extended to the individual
+by society in its discretion. However this may be, practically any
+extension of the exercise of the suffrage to individuals or classes
+not now enjoying it must be by concession of those who already possess
+it, and such extension without revolution will be through the suffrage
+itself exercised by those who have it under existing forms.
+
+The appeal by those who have it not must be made to those who are
+asked to part with a portion of their own power, and it is not strange
+that human nature, which is an essential element in the male sex,
+should hesitate and delay to yield one-half its power to those whose
+cause, however strong in reason and justice, lacks that physical
+force which so largely has been the means by which the masses of men
+themselves hare wrung their own rights from rulers and kings.
+
+It is not strange that when overwhelmed with argument and half won by
+appeals to his better nature to concede to woman her equal power in
+the state, and ashamed to blankly refuse that which he finds no
+reason for longer withholding, man avoids the dilemma by a pretended
+elevation of his helpmeet to a higher sphere, where, as an angel,
+she has certain gauzy ethereal resources and superior functions,
+occupations, and attributes which render the possession of mere
+earthly every-day powers and privileges non-essential to woman,
+however mere mortal men themselves may find them indispensable to
+their own freedom and happiness.
+
+But to the denial of her right to vote, whether that denial be the
+blunt refusal of the ignorant or the polished evasion of the refined
+courtier and politician, woman can oppose only her most solemn and
+perpetual appeal to the reason of man and to the justice of Almighty
+God. She must continually point out the nature and object of the
+suffrage and the necessity that she possess it for her own and the
+public good.
+
+What, then, is the suffrage, and why is it necessary that woman should
+possess and exercise this function of freemen? I quote briefly from
+the report of the committee:
+
+    The rights for the maintenance of which human governments are
+    constituted are life, liberty, and property. These rights are
+    common to men and women alike, and whatever citizen or subject
+    exists as a member of any body-politic, under any form of
+    government, is entitled to demand from the sovereign power the
+    full protection of these rights.
+
+    This right to the protection of rights appertains to the
+    individual, not to the family alone, or to any form of
+    association, whether social or corporate. Probably not more than
+    five-eighths of the men of legal age, qualified to vote, are heads
+    of families, and not more than that proportion of adult women
+    are united with men in the legal merger of married life. It is,
+    therefore, quite incorrect to speak of the state as an aggregate
+    of families duly represented at the ballot-box by their male head.
+    The relation between the government and the individual is direct;
+    all rights are individual rights, all duties are individual
+    duties.
+
+    Government in its two highest functions is legislative and
+    judicial. By these powers the sovereignty prescribes the law,
+    and directs its application to the vindication of rights and the
+    redress of wrongs. Conscience and intelligence are the only forces
+    which enter into the exercise of this highest and primary function
+    of government. The remaining department is the executive or
+    administrative, and in all forms of government--the republican
+    as well as in tyranny--the primary element of administration is
+    force, and even in this department conscience and intelligence are
+    indispensable to its direction.
+
+    If now we are to decide who of our sixty millions of human beings
+    are to constitute the citizenship of this Republic and by virtue
+    of their qualifications to be the law-making power, by what tests
+    shall the selection be determined?
+
+    The suffrage which is the sovereignty is this great primary
+    law-making power. It is not the executive power proper at all. It
+    is not founded upon force. Only that degree of physical strength
+    which is essential to a sound body--the home of the healthy mental
+    and moral constitution--the sound soul in the sound body
+    is required in the performance of the function of primary
+    legislation. Never in the history of this or any other genuine
+    republic has the law-making power, whether in general elections or
+    in the framing of laws in legislative assemblies, been vested in
+    individuals who have exercised it by reason of their physical
+    powers. On the contrary, the physically weak have never for that
+    reason been deprived of the suffrage nor of the privilege of
+    service in the public councils so long as they possessed the
+    necessary powers of locomotion and expression, of conscience and
+    intelligence, which are common to all. The aged and the physically
+    weak have, as a rule, by reason of superior wisdom and moral
+    sense, far more than made good any bodily inferiority by which
+    they have differed from the more robust members of the community
+    in the discussion and decisions of the ballot-box and in councils
+    of the state.
+
+    The executive power of itself is a mere physical
+    instrumentality--an animal quality--and it is confided from
+    necessity to those individuals who possess that quality, but
+    always with danger, except so far as wisdom and virtue control its
+    exercise. And it is obvious that the greater the mass of higher
+    and spiritual forces, whether found in those to whom the execution
+    of the law is assigned or in the great mass by whom the suffrage
+    is exercised, and who direct the execution of the law, the greater
+    will be the safety and the surer will be the happiness of the
+    state.
+
+    It is too late to question the intellectual and moral capacity
+    of woman to understand great political issues (which are always
+    primarily questions of conscience--questions of the intelligent
+    application of the principles of right and of wrong in public and
+    private affairs) and properly decide them at the polls. Indeed,
+    so far as your committee are aware, the pretense is no longer
+    advanced that woman should not vote by reason of her mental or
+    moral unfitness to perform this legislative function; but the
+    suffrage is denied to her because she can not hang criminals,
+    suppress mobs, nor handle the enginery of war. We have already
+    seen the untenable nature of this assumption, because those who
+    make it bestow the suffrage upon very large classes of men who,
+    however well qualified they may be to vote, are physically unable
+    to perform any of the duties which appertain to the execution of
+    the law and the defense of the state. Scarcely a Senator on
+    this floor is liable by law to perform a military or other
+    administrative duty, yet the rule so many set up against the right
+    of women to vote would disfranchise nearly this whole body.
+
+    But it unnecessary to grant that woman can not fight. History is
+    full of examples of her heroism in danger, of her endurance and
+    fortitude in trial, and of her indispensable and supreme service
+    in hospital and field; and in the handling of the deft and
+    horrible machinery and infernal agencies which science and art
+    have prepared and are preparing for human destruction in future
+    wars, woman may perform her whole part in the common assault or
+    the common defense. It is hardly worth while to consider this
+    trivial objection that she is incompetent for purposes of national
+    murder or of bloody self-defense as the basis of the denial of a
+    great fundamental right, when we consider that if that right were
+    given to her she would by its exercise almost certainly abolish
+    this great crime of the nations, which has always inflicted upon
+    her the chief burden of woe.
+
+It will be admitted that the act of voting is operative in government
+only as a means of deciding upon the adoption or rejection of measures
+or of the selection of officers to enact, administer, and execute the
+laws.
+
+In the discharge of these functions it also must be admitted that
+intelligence and conscience are the faculties requisite to secure
+their proper performance.
+
+In this day when woman has demonstrated that she is fully the
+intellectual equal of man in the profound as well as in the politer
+walks of learning--in art, science, literature, and, considering her
+opportunities, that she is not his inferior in any of the professions
+or in the great mass of useful occupations, while she is, in fact,
+becoming the chief educator of the race and is the acknowledged
+support of the great ministrations of charity and religion; when in
+such great organizations as the suffrage associations, missionary
+societies, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and even
+upon the still larger scale of international action, she has exhibited
+her power by mere moral influences and the inspiration of great
+purposes, without the aid of legal penalties or even of tangible
+inconveniences, to mold and direct the discordant thought and action
+of thousands and millions of people scattered over separate States,
+and sometimes even living in countries hostile to each other to the
+accomplishment of great earthly or heavenly ends, it is unreasonable
+to deny to woman the suffrage in political affairs upon the
+false allegation that she is wanting in the very qualities most
+indispensable and requisite for the proper exercise of this great
+right.
+
+The advocates of universal male suffrage have long since ceased
+to deny the ballot to woman upon the ground that she is unfit or
+incompetent to exercise it.
+
+There is a class of high-stepping objectors, like Ouida, who decry the
+sound judgment and moral excellence of woman as compared with man, but
+in the same breath these people deny the suffrage to the masses of men
+and advocate "the just supremacy of the fittest," so that no time need
+be wasted in refutation of those malignant and libelous aspersions
+upon our mothers, sisters, and wives, which, when carried to logical
+conclusions by their own authors, deny the fundamental principles of
+liberty to man and woman alike, and reassert in its baldest form the
+dogma that "the existing system of electoral power all over the world
+is absurd, and will remain so because in no nation is there the
+courage, perhaps in no nation is there the intellectual power, capable
+of putting forward and sustaining the logical doctrine of the just
+supremacy of the fittest."
+
+In fact the minority of the committee, and this is true of all honest,
+intelligent men who believe in the republican system of government at
+all, concede that woman has the capacity and moral fitness requisite
+to exercise the ballot. That class of women represented by the author
+of "Letters from a Chimney Corner," whose work has been adopted by
+the minority as the basis of their report, speaking through the "fair
+authoress," say that "if women were to be considered in their highest
+and final estate as merely individual beings, and if the right to the
+ballot were to be conceded to man as an individual, it might perhaps
+he logically argued that women also possessed the inherent right to
+vote." Let me read from the views of the minority on page 1:
+
+    The undersigned minority of the Committee of the Senate on Woman
+    Suffrage, to whom was referred Senate Resolution No. 5, proposing
+    an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to grant
+    the right to vote to the women of the United States, beg leave to
+    submit the following minority report, consisting of extracts from
+    a little volume entitled, "Letters from a Chimney Corner," written
+    by a highly cultivated lady, Mrs. ----, of Chicago, This gifted
+    lady has discussed the question with so much clearness and force
+    that we make no apology to the Senate for substituting quotations
+    from her book in place of anything we might produce. We quote
+    first from chapter 3, which is entitled "The value of suffrage to
+    women much overestimated."
+
+The fair authoress says:
+
+    "If women were to be considered in their highest and final estate
+    as merely individual beings, and if the right to the ballot were
+    to be conceded to man as an individual, it might perhaps be
+    logically argued that women also possessed the inherent right to
+    vote. But from the oldest times, and through all the history
+    of the race, has run the glimmer of an idea, more or less
+    distinguishable in different ages and under different
+    circumstances, that neither man nor woman is, as such, individual;
+    that neither being is of itself a whole, a unit, but each requires
+    to be supplemented by the other before its true structural
+    integrity can be achieved. Of this idea, the science of botany
+    furnishes the moat perfect illustration. The stamens on the one
+    hand, and the ovary and pistil on the other, may indeed reside in
+    one blossom, which then exists in a married or reproductive state.
+    But equally well, the stamens or male organs may reside in one
+    plant, and the ovary and pistil or female organs may reside in
+    another. In that case, the two plants are required to make one
+    structurally complete organization. Each is but half a plant, an
+    incomplete individual by itself. The life principle of each must
+    be united to that of the other; the twain must be indeed one flesh
+    before the organization is either structurally or functionally
+    complete."
+
+This is a concession of the whole argument, unless the highest and
+final estate of woman is to be something else than a mere individual.
+It would also follow that if such be her destiny--that is, to be
+something else than a mere "individual being"--and if for that reason
+she is to be denied the suffrage, then man equally should be denied
+the ballot if his highest and final estate is to be something else
+than a "mere individual."
+
+Thereupon the minority of the committee, through the "Fair Authoress,"
+proceed to show that both man and woman are designed for a higher
+final estate--to wit, that of matrimony. It seems to be conceded
+that man is just as much fitted for matrimony as woman herself, and
+thereupon the whole subject is illuminated with certain botanical lore
+about stamens and pistils, which, however relevant to matrimony, does
+not seem to me to prove that therefore woman should not vote unless at
+the same time it proves that man should not vote either. And certainly
+it can not apply to those women any more than to those men whose
+highest and final estate never is merged in the family relation at
+all, and even "Ouida" concedes "that the project ... to give votes
+only to unmarried women may be dismissed without discussion, as it
+would be found to be wholly untenable."
+
+There is no escape from it. The discussion has passed so far that
+among intelligent people who believe in the republican form--that
+is, free government--all mature men and women have under the same
+circumstance and conditions the same rights to defend, the same
+grievances to redress, and, therefore, the same necessity for the
+exercise of this great fundamental right, of all human beings in free
+society. For the right to vote is the great primitive right. It is the
+right in which all freedom originates and culminates. It is the right
+from which all others spring, in which they merge, and without which
+they fall whenever assailed.
+
+This right makes, and is all the difference between government by and
+with the consent of the governed and government without and against
+the consent of the governed; and that is the difference between
+freedom and slavery. If the right to vote be not that difference, what
+is? No, sir. If either sex as a class can dispense with the right to
+vote, then take it from the strong, and no longer rob the weak of
+their defense for the benefit of the strong.
+
+But it is impossible to conceive of the suffrage as a right dependent
+at all upon such an irrelevant condition as sex. It is an individual,
+a personal right. It may be withheld by force; but if withheld by
+reason of sex it is a moral robbery.
+
+But it is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the
+performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not
+claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to
+vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise this high
+function in the state because of motherhood. On the contrary, if any
+woman has a motive more than another person, man or woman, to secure
+the enactment and enforcement of good laws, it is the mother, who,
+beside her own life, person, and property, to the protection of which
+the ballot is as essential as to the same rights possessed by man,
+has her little contingent of immortal beings to conduct safely to
+the portals of active life through all the snares and pitfalls woven
+around them by bad men and bad laws which bad men have made, or good
+laws which bad men, unhindered by the good, have defied or have
+prostituted, and rightly to prepare, them for the discharge of all the
+duties of their day and generation, including the exercise of the very
+right denied to their mother.
+
+Certainly, if but for motherhood she should vote, then ten thousand
+times more necessary is it that the mother should be guarded and armed
+with this great social and political power for the sake of all men and
+women who are yet to be. But it is said that she has not the time. Let
+us see. By the best deductions I can make from the census and from
+other sources there are 15,000,000 women of voting age in this country
+at the present time, of whom not more than 10,000,000 are married and
+not more than 7,500,000 are still liable to the duties of maternity,
+for it will be remembered that a large proportion of the mothers of
+our country at any given time are below the voting age, while of those
+who are above it another large proportion have passed beyond the point
+of this objection. Not more than one-half the female population of
+voting age are liable to this objection. Then why disfranchise the
+7,500,000, the other half, as to whom your objection, even if valid
+as to any, does not apply at all; and these, too, as a class the most
+mature and therefore the best qualified to vote of any of their sex?
+But how much is there of this objection of want of time or physical
+strength to vote, in its application to women who are bearing and
+training the coming millions? The families of the country average five
+persons in number. If we assume that this gives an average of three
+children to every pair, which is probably the full number, or if we
+assume that every married mother, after she becomes of voting age,
+bears three children, which is certainly the full allowance, and that
+twenty-four years are consumed in doing it, there is one child born
+every eight years whose coming is to interfere with the exercise of a
+duty of privilege which, in most States, and in all the most important
+elections, occurs only one day in two years.
+
+That same mother will attend church at least forty times yearly on
+the average from her cradle to her grave, beside an infinity of other
+social, religious, and industrial obligations which she performs and
+assumes to perform because she is a married woman and a mother rather
+than for any other reason whatever. Yet it is proposed to deprive
+women--yes, all women alike--of an inestimable privilege and the chief
+power which can be exercised by any free individual in the state for
+the reason that on any given day of election not more than one woman
+in twenty of voting age will probably not be able to reach the polls.
+It does seem probable that on these interesting occasions if the
+husband and wife disagree in politics they could arrange a pair, and
+the probability is, that arrangement failing, one could be consummated
+with some other lady in like fortunate circumstances, of opposite
+political opinions. More men are kept from the polls by drunkenness,
+or, being at the polls, vote under the influence of strong drink, to
+the reproach and destruction of our free institutions, and who, if
+woman could and did vote, would cast the ballot of sobriety, good
+order, and reform under her holy influences, than all those who would
+be kept from any given election by the necessary engagements of
+mothers at home.
+
+When one thinks of the innumerable and trifling causes which keep many
+of the best of men and strongest opponents of woman suffrage from the
+polls upon important occasions it is difficult to be tolerant of the
+objection that woman by reason of motherhood has no time to vote. Why,
+sir, the greater exposure of man to the casualties of life actually
+disables him in such way as to make it physically impossible for him
+to exercise the franchise more frequently than is the case with
+women, including mothers and all. And if this liability to lose the
+opportunity to exercise the right once or possibly twice in a lifetime
+is a reason that women should not he allowed to vote at all, why
+should men not be disfranchised also by the same rule?
+
+But it is urged that woman does not desire the privilege. If the right
+exist at all it is an individual right, and not one which belongs to a
+class or to the sex as such. Yet men tell us that they will vote the
+suffrage to women whenever the majority of women desire it. Are, then,
+our rights the property of the majority of a disfranchised class to
+which we may chance to belong? What would we say if it were seriously
+proposed to recall the suffrage from all colored or from all white men
+because a majority of either class should decline or for any cause
+fail to vote? I know that it is said that the suffrage is a privilege
+to be extended by those who have it to those who have it not. But the
+matter of right, of moral right, to the franchise does not depend
+upon the indifference of those who possess it or of those who do not
+possess it to the desire of those women who desire to enjoy their
+right and to discharge their duty. If one or many choose not to claim
+their right it is no argument for depriving me of mine or one woman of
+hers. There are many reasons why some women declare themselves opposed
+to the extension of suffrage to their sex. Some well-fed and pampered,
+without serious experiences in life, are incapable of comprehending
+the subject at all. Vast numbers, who secretly and earnestly desire it
+from the long habit of deference to the wishes of the other sex, upon
+whom they are so entirely dependent while disfranchised, and knowing
+the hostility of their "protectors" to the agitation of the subject,
+conceal their real sentiments, and the "lord" of the family referring
+this question to his wife, who has heard him sneer or worse than sneer
+at suffragists for half a lifetime, ought not to expect an answer
+which she knows will subject her to his censure and ridicule or even
+his unexpressed disapprobation.
+
+It is like the old appeal of the master to his slave to know if
+he would be free. Full well did the wise and wary slave know that
+happiness depended upon declared contentment with his lot. But all
+the same the world does move. Colored men are free. Colored men vote.
+Women will vote. A little further on I shall revert to the evidence of
+a general and growing desire on her part and on the part of just and
+intelligent men that the suffrage be extended to women.
+
+But we are told that husband and wife will disagree and thus the
+suffrage will destroy the family and ruin society. If a married
+couple will quarrel at all, they will find the occasion, and it were
+fortunate indeed if their contention might concern important affairs.
+There is no peace in the family save where love is, and the same
+spirit which enables the husband and wife to enforce the toleration
+act between themselves in religious matters will keep the peace
+between them in political discussions. At all events, this argument
+is unworthy of notice at all unless we are to push it to its logical
+conclusion, and, for the sake of peace in the family, to prohibit
+woman absolutely the exercise of freedom of thought and speech.
+Men live with their countrymen and disagree with them in politics,
+religion, and ten thousand of the affairs of life, as often the
+trifling as the important. What harm, then, if woman be allowed her
+thought and vote upon the tariff, education, temperance, peace and
+war, and whatsoever else the suffrage decides?
+
+But we are told that no government, of which we have authentic
+history, ever gave to woman a share in the sovereignty.
+
+This is not true, for the annals of monarchies and despotisms have
+been rendered illustrious by queens of surpassing brilliance and
+power. But even if it be true that no republic ever enfranchised woman
+with the ballot--even so until within one hundred years universal or
+even general suffrage was unknown among men.
+
+Has the millennium yet dawned? Is all progress at an end? If that
+which is should therefore remain, why abolish the slavery of men?
+
+But we are informed that woman does not vote when she has the
+opportunity. Wherever she has the unrestricted right she exercises it.
+The records of Wyoming and Washington demonstrate the fact.
+
+And in these Territories, too, as well as wherever else she has
+exercised the suffrage, she has elevated man to her own level, and
+has made the voting precinct as respectable and decorous as the
+lecture-room or the assemblies of the devout. All the experience there
+is refutes the apprehension of those who fear that woman will either
+neglect the discharge of her great duty, when allowed its fair and
+equal exercise, or that the rude and baser sort will overwhelm and
+banish the noble and refined.
+
+But to my mind it seems like trifling with a great subject to dwell
+upon topics like this. It can only be justified by the continual
+iteration of the objection by the opponents of woman suffrage, who in
+the lack of substantial grounds whereupon to base their opposition to
+the exercise of a great right by one-half the community declare that
+there is no time in which woman can vote.
+
+I will now read an extract from the report of the majority of the
+committee, showing to a certain extent the degree of consequence which
+this movement has assumed, its extent throughout our country, and
+something of its duration. I have not the latest data, for since this
+report was compiled there has been action in several States, and a
+great deal of popular discussion and a vast amount of demonstration
+from the action of popular assemblies.
+
+The committee say:
+
+    This movement for woman suffrage has developed during the last
+    half century into one of great strength. The first petition was
+    presented to the Legislature of New York in 1835. It was repeated
+    in 1846, and since that time the petition has been urged upon
+    nearly every Legislature in the Northern States. Five States
+    have voted upon the question of amending their constitutions by
+    striking out the word "male" from the suffrage clause--Kansas in
+    1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882, and
+    Oregon in 1884.
+
+    The ratio of the popular vote in each case was about one-third for
+    the amendment and two-thirds against it. Three Territories have or
+    have had full suffrage for women. In two, Wyoming since 1869
+    and Washington since 1883, the experiment (!) is an unqualified
+    success. In Utah Miss Anthony keenly and justly observes that
+    suffrage is as much of a success for the Mormon women as for the
+    men.
+
+    In eleven States school suffrage for women exists. In Kansas, from
+    her admission as a State. In Kentucky and Michigan fully as long
+    a time. School suffrage for women also exists in Colorado,
+    Minnesota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York,
+    Nebraska, and Oregon.
+
+    In all these States, except Minnesota, school suffrage was
+    extended to women by the respective Legislatures, and in Minnesota
+    by the popular vote, in November, 1876. Not only these eleven
+    States, but in nearly all the other Northern and Western States
+    women are elected to the offices of county and city superintendent
+    of public schools and as members of school boards. In Louisiana
+    the constitution of 1879 makes women eligible to school offices.
+
+    It may also be observed as indicating a rising and controlling
+    public sentiment in recognition of the right and capacity of woman
+    for public affairs that she is eligible to such offices as that of
+    county clerk, register of deeds, and the like in many and perhaps
+    in all the States. Kansas and Iowa elected several women to these
+    positions in the election of November, 1885, while President Grant
+    alone appointed more than five thousand women to the office of
+    postmaster; and although many women have been appointed in the
+    Departments and to pension agencies and like important employments
+    and trusts, so far as your committee are aware no charge of
+    incompetency or of malfeasance in office has ever yet been
+    sustained against a woman.
+
+    It may be further stated in this connection that nearly every
+    Northern State has had before it from time to time since 1870 a
+    bill for the submission of the question of woman suffrage to the
+    popular vote. In some instances such a resolution has been passed
+    at one session and failed to be ratified at another by from one
+    to three votes; thus Iowa passed it in 1870, killed it in 1872;
+    passed it in 1874, failed to do so in 1876; passed it in 1878, and
+    failed in 1880; passed it again in 1882, and defeated it in
+    1884; four times over and over, and this winter these heroic and
+    indomitable women are trying it in Iowa again.
+
+    If men were to make such a struggle for their rights it would be
+    considered a fine thing, and there would be books and even poetry
+    written about it.
+
+    In New York, since 1880, the women have urged this great measure
+    before the Legislature each year. There it takes the form of a
+    bill to prohibit the disfranchisement of women. This bill has
+    several times come within five votes of passing the assembly.
+
+    In many States well sustained efforts for municipal suffrage have
+    been made, and, as if in rebuke to the conservatism, or worse, of
+    this great Republic, this right of municipal suffrage is already
+    enjoyed in the province of Ontario, Canada, and throughout the
+    island of Great Britain by unmarried women to the same extent as
+    by men, there being the same property qualification required of
+    each.
+
+    The movement for the amendment of the National Constitution began
+    by petitioning Congress December, 1865, and since 1869 there have
+    been consecutive applications to every Congress praying for the
+    submission to the States of a proposition similar to the joint
+    resolution herewith reported to the Senate.
+
+    The petitions have come from all parts of the country; more
+    especially from the Northern and Western States, although there is
+    an extensive and increasing desire for the suffrage existing among
+    the women in the Southern States, as we are informed by those
+    whose interest in the subject makes them familiar with the real
+    state of feeling in that part of our country. It is impossible
+    to know just what proportion of the people--men and women--have
+    expressed their desire by petition to the National Legislature
+    during the last twenty years, but we are informed by Miss Anthony
+    that in the year 1871 Senator Sumner collected the petitions from
+    the files of the Senate and House of Representatives, and that
+    there were then an immense number. A far greater number have been
+    presented since that time, and the same lady is our authority for
+    the estimate that in all more than two hundred thousand petitions,
+    by select and representative men and women, have been poured upon
+    Congress in behalf of this prayer of woman to be free. Who is so
+    interested in the framing of the law as woman, whose only defense
+    is the law? There never was a stronger exhibition of popular
+    demand by American citizens to be heard in the court of the people
+    for the vindication of a fundamental right.
+
+Since the submission of the report the attempt has been made to secure
+action in several of the State Legislatures. One which came very near
+being successful was made in the State of Vermont. The suffrage was
+extended, if I am not incorrectly informed, so far as the action of
+the house of representatives of that State could give it, and an
+effort being made to propose some restriction and condition upon the
+suffrage it was defeated, when, as I am told by the friends of the
+movement, if it could have reached a vote in the Vermont Legislature
+on the naked proposition of suffrage to women as suffrage is extended
+to men, they felt the very greatest confidence that they would have
+been able to secure favorable action by the Legislature of that State.
+
+Miss Anthony informs me since she came here at the present session
+(and I am sorry I have not had the opportunity of extended conference
+with her) that in the State of Kansas, where she spent several weeks
+in the discussion of the subject before vast masses of people, the
+largest halls, rinks, and places for the accommodation of popular
+assemblages in the State were crowded to overflowing to listen to
+her address. In every instance she has taken a vote of those vast
+audiences as to whether they were in favor of woman suffrage or
+against it, and in no single instance has there been a solitary vote
+against the extension of the right, but affirmative and universal
+action of those great assemblies demanding that it be extended to
+women. And like demonstrations of popular approval are developing in
+all parts of the country, perhaps not to so marked an extent as these
+which I have just stated; but it is a growing feeling in this country
+that women should have this right, and above all woman and man
+demanding that she should have the opportunity to try her case before
+the American people, that this right of petition should be heeded by
+Congress and the joint resolution for the submission of the matter for
+discussion by the States should be passed by the necessary two-thirds
+vote.
+
+It is sometimes, too, urged against this movement for the submission
+of a resolution for a national constitutional amendment that women
+should go to the States and fight it out there. But we did not send
+the colored man to the States. No other amendment touching the general
+national interest is left to be fought out by individual action in
+the individual States. Under the terms of the Constitution itself the
+people of the United States, having some universal common interest
+affected by law or by the want of law, are invited to come to this
+body and try here their question of right, or at all events through
+the agency of Congress to submit that proposition to the people at
+large in order that in the general national forum it may receive
+discussion, and by the action of three-fourths of the States, if
+favorable, their idea may be incorporated in the fundamental law.
+
+I will not detain the Senate further in the discussion of this
+subject.
+
+It should be borne in mind that the proposition is to submit to men
+the question whether woman shall vote. The jury will certainly not be
+prejudiced in her favor as against the public good. There can be no
+danger of a verdict in her favor contrary to the evidence in the case.
+
+We ask only for her an opportunity to bring her suit in the great
+court for the amendment of fundamental law. It is impossible for any
+right mind to escape the impression of solemn responsibility which
+attaches to our decision. Ridicule and wit of whatever quality are
+here as much out of place as in the debates upon the Declaration of
+Independence. We are affirming or denying the right of petition which
+by all law belongs as much to women as to men. Millions of women and
+thousands of men in our own country demand that she at least have the
+opportunity to be heard. Hear, even if you strike.
+
+The lamented Anthony, so long the object of reverence, affection, and
+pride in this body, among the last acts of his public life, in
+signing the favorable report of this resolution, made the following
+declaration:
+
+    The Constitution is wisely conservative in the provision of its
+    own amendment. It is eminently proper that whenever a large
+    number of the people have indicated a desire for an amendment the
+    judgment of the amending power should be consulted. In view of the
+    extensive agitation of the question of woman suffrage, and the
+    numerous and respectable petitions that have been presented
+    to Congress in its support, I unite with the committee in
+    recommending that the proposed amendment be submitted to the
+    States.
+
+    H.B. ANTHONY.
+
+Profoundly convinced of the justice of woman's demand for the
+suffrage, and that the proper method of securing the right is by an
+amendment of the national Constitution, I urge the adoption of the
+joint resolution upon the still broader ground so clearly and calmly
+stated by the great Senator whose words I have just read. I appeal to
+you, Senators, to grant this petition of woman that she may be heard
+for her claim of right. How could you reject that petition, even were
+there but one faint voice beseeching your ear? How can you deny the
+demand of millions who believe in suffrage for women, and who can not
+be forever silenced, for they give voice to the innate cry of the
+human heart that justice be done not alone to man, but to that half of
+this nation which now is free only by the grace of the other, and that
+by our action to-day we indorse, if we do not initiate, a movement
+which, in the development of our race, shall guarantee liberty to all
+without distinction of sex, even as our glorious Constitution already
+grants the suffrage to every citizen without distinction of color or
+race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Further consideration of the resolution postponed until January 25,
+1887, when it was resumed, as follows:
+
+
+_Tuesday, January 25, 1887._
+
+WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
+
+Mr. BLAIR. I now move that the Senate proceed to consider the joint
+resolution (S.R. 5) proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the
+United States extending the right of suffrage to women.
+
+The motion was agreed to; and the Senate, as in Committee of the
+Whole, proceeded to consider the joint resolution.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. The joint resolution will be read.
+
+The Chief Clerk read the joint resolution, as follows:
+
+    _Resolved (two-thirds of each House concurring therein)_, That the
+    following article be proposed to the Legislatures of the several
+    States as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
+    which, when ratified by three-fourths of the said Legislatures,
+    shall be valid as part of said Constitution, namely:
+
+    ARTICLE--.
+
+    Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote
+    shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
+    State on account of sex.
+
+    Sec. 2. The Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation,
+    to enforce the provisions of this article.
+
+Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, the joint resolution introduced by my
+friend, the Senator from New Hampshire [Mr. BLAIR], proposing an
+amendment to the Constitution of the United States, conferring the
+right to vote upon the women of the United States, is one of paramount
+importance, as it involves great questions far reaching in their
+tendency, which seriously affect the very pillars of our social
+fabric, which involve the peace and harmony of society, the unity of
+the family, and much of the future success of our Government. The
+question should therefore he met fairly and discussed with firmness,
+but with moderation and forbearance.
+
+No one contributes anything valuable to the debate by the use of harsh
+terms, or by impugning motives, or by disparaging the arguments of the
+opposition. Where the prosperity of the race and the peace of society
+are involved, we should, on both sides, meet fairly the arguments of
+our respective opponents.
+
+This question has been discussed a great deal outside of Congress,
+sometimes in bad temper and sometimes illogically and unprofitably,
+but the advocates of the proposed amendment and the opponents of it
+have each put forth, probably in their strongest form, the reasons and
+arguments which are considered by each as conclusive in favor of the
+cause they advocate. I do not expect to contribute much that is new
+on a subject that has been so often and so ably discussed; but what I
+have to say will be in the main a reproduction in substance of what
+I and others have already said on the subject, and which I think
+important enough to be placed upon the record in the argument of the
+case.
+
+In connection with my friend, the honorable Senator from Missouri [Mr.
+COCKRELL], I have in a report set forth substantially the reasons
+and arguments which to my mind establish the fact that the proposed
+legislation would be injudicious and unwise, and I shall not hesitate
+to reiterate here such portions of what was then said as seem to me to
+be important.
+
+I believe that the Creator intended that the sphere of the males and
+females of our race should be different, and that their duties and
+obligations, while they differ materially, are equally important and
+equally honorable, and that each sex is equally well qualified by
+natural endowments for the discharge of the important duties which
+pertain to each, and that each sex is equally competent to discharge
+those duties.
+
+We find an abundance of evidence, both in the works of nature and in
+the Divine revelation, to establish the fact that the family properly
+regulated is the foundation and pillar of society, and is the most
+important of any other human institution.
+
+In the Divine economy it is provided that the man shall be the head
+of the family, and shall take upon himself the solemn obligation of
+providing for and protecting the family.
+
+Man, by reason of his physical strength, and his other endowments and
+faculties, is qualified for the discharge of those duties that
+require strength and ability to combat with the sterner realities and
+difficulties of life. The different classes of outdoor labor which
+require physical strength and endurance are by nature assigned to man,
+the head of the family, as part of his task. He discharges such labors
+as require greater physical endurance and strength than the female sex
+are usually found to possess.
+
+It is not only his duty to provide for and protect the family, but
+as a member of the community it is also his duty to discharge the
+laborious and responsible obligations which the family owe to the
+State, and which obligations must be discharged by the head of the
+family, until the male members of the family have grown up to manhood
+and are able to aid in the discharge of those obligations, when it
+becomes their duty each in his turn to take charge of and rear a
+family, for which he is responsible.
+
+Among other duties which the head of the family owes to the State, is
+military duty in time of war, which he, when able-bodied, is able to
+discharge, and which the female members of the family are unable to
+discharge.
+
+He is also under obligation to discharge jury duty, and by himself
+or his representatives to perform his part of the labor necessary to
+construct and keep in order roads, bridges, streets, and all grades
+of public highways. And in this progressive age upon the male sex is
+devolved the duty of constructing and operating our railroads, and
+the engines and other rolling-stock with which they are operated; of
+building, equipping, and launching, shipping and other water craft of
+every character necessary for the transportation of passengers and
+freight upon our rivers, our lakes, and upon the high seas.
+
+The labor in our fields, sowing, cultivating, and reaping crops must
+be discharged mainly by the male sex, as the female sex, for want of
+physical strength, are generally unable to discharge these duties.
+As it is the duty of the male sex to perform the obligations to the
+State, to society, and to the family, already mentioned, with numerous
+others that might be enumerated, it is also their duty to aid in
+the government of the State, which is simply a great aggregation
+of families. Society can not be preserved nor can the people be
+prosperous without good government. The government of our country is a
+government of the people, and it becomes necessary that the class of
+people upon whom the responsibility rests should assemble together and
+consider and discuss the great questions of governmental policy which
+from time to time are presented for their decision.
+
+This often requires the assembling of caucuses in the night time, as
+well as public assemblages in the daytime. It is a laborious task, for
+which the male sex is infinitely better fitted than the female sex;
+and after proper consideration and discussion of the measures that may
+divide the country from time to time, the duty devolves upon those who
+are responsible for the government, at times and places to be fixed by
+law, to meet and by ballot to decide the great questions of government
+upon which the prosperity of the country depends.
+
+These are some of the active and sterner duties of life to which
+the male sex is by nature better fitted than the female sex. If in
+carrying out the policy of the State on great measures adjudged vital
+such policy should lead to war, either foreign or domestic, it would
+seem to follow very naturally that those who have been responsible for
+the management of the State should be the parties to take the hazards
+and hardships of the struggle.
+
+Here, again, man is better fitted by nature for the discharge of the
+duty--woman is unfit for it. So much for some of the duties imposed
+upon the male sex, for the discharge of which the Creator has endowed
+them with proper strength and faculties.
+
+On the other hand, the Creator has assigned to woman very laborious
+and responsible duties, by no means less important than those imposed
+upon the male sex, though entirely different in their character. In
+the family she is a queen. She alone is fitted for the discharge of
+the sacred trust of wife and the endearing relation of mother.
+
+While the man is contending with the sterner duties of life, the whole
+time of the noble, affectionate, and true woman is required in the
+discharge of the delicate and difficult duties assigned her in the
+family circle, in her church relations, and in the society where her
+lot is cast. When the husband returns home weary and worn in the
+discharge of the difficult and laborious task assigned him, he finds
+in the good wife solace and consolation, which is nowhere else
+afforded. If he is despondent and distressed, she cheers his heart
+with words of kindness; if he is sick or languishing, she soothes,
+comforts, and ministers to him as no one but an affectionate wife
+can do. If his burdens are onerous, she divides their weight by the
+exercise of her love and her sympathy.
+
+But a still more important duty devolves upon the mother. After
+having brought into existence the offspring of the nuptial union, the
+children are dependent upon the mother as they are not upon any other
+human being. The trust is a most sacred, most responsible, and most
+important one. To watch over them in their infancy, and as the mind
+begins to expand to train, direct, and educate it in the paths of
+virtue and usefulness is the high trust assigned to the mother. She
+trains the twig as the tree should be inclined.
+
+She molds the character. She educates the heart as well as the
+intellect, and she prepares the future man, now the boy, for honor or
+dishonor. Upon the manner in which she discharges her duty depends the
+fact whether he shall in future be a useful citizen or a burden to
+society. She inculcates lessons of patriotism, manliness, religion,
+and virtue, fitting the man by reason of his training to be an
+ornament to society, or dooming him by her neglect to a life of
+dishonor and shame. Society acts unwisely when it imposes upon her
+the duties that by common consent have always been assigned to the
+stronger and sterner sex, and the discharge of which causes her to
+neglect those sacred and all important duties to her children and to
+the society of which they are members.
+
+In the church, by her piety, her charity, and her Christian purity,
+she not only aids society by a proper training of her own children,
+but the children of others, whom she encourages to come to the sacred
+altar, are taught to walk in the paths of rectitude, honor, and
+religion. In the Sunday-school room the good woman is a princess, and
+she exerts an influence which purifies and ennobles society, training
+the young in the truths of religion, making the Sunday-school the
+nursery of the church, and elevating society to the higher planes of
+pure religion, virtue, and patriotism. In the sick room and among the
+humble, the poor, and the suffering, the good woman, like an angel
+of light, cheers the hearts and revives the hopes of the poor, the
+suffering, and the despondent.
+
+It would be a vain attempt to undertake to enumerate the refining,
+endearing, and ennobling influences exercised by the true woman in her
+relations to the family and to society when she occupies the sphere
+assigned to her by the laws of nature and the Divine inspiration,
+which are our surest guide for the present and the future life. But
+how can woman be expected to meet these heavy responsibilities, and to
+discharge these delicate and most important duties of wife, Christian,
+teacher, minister of mercy, friend of the suffering, and consoler of
+the despondent and needy, if we impose upon her the grosser, rougher,
+and harsher duties which nature has assigned to the male sex?
+
+If the wife and the mother is required to leave the sacred precincts
+of home, and to attempt to do military duty when the state is in
+peril; or if she is to be required to leave her home from day to day
+in attendance upon the court as a juror, and to be shut up in the jury
+room from night to night with men who are strangers while a question
+of life or property is being discussed; if she is to attend political
+meetings, take part in political discussions, and mingle with the male
+sex at political gatherings; if she is to become an active politician;
+if she is to attend political caucuses at late hours of the night;
+if she is to take part in all the unsavory work that may be deemed
+necessary for the triumph of her party; and if on election day she is
+to leave her home and go upon the streets electioneering for votes for
+the candidates who receive her support, and mingling among the crowds
+of men who gather round the polls, she is to press her way through
+them to the precinct and deposit her ballot; if she is to take part
+in the corporate struggles of the city or town in which she resides,
+attend to the duties of his honor, the mayor, the councilman, or of
+policeman, to say nothing of the many other like obligations which are
+disagreeable even to the male sex, how is she, with all these heavy
+duties of citizen, politician, and officeholder resting upon her
+shoulders, to attend to the more sacred, delicate, and refining trust
+to which we have already referred, and for which she is peculiarly
+fitted by nature? If she is to discharge the duties last mentioned,
+how is she, in connection with them, to discharge the more refining,
+elevating, and ennobling duties of wife, mother, Christian, and
+friend, which are found in the sphere where nature has placed her?
+Who is to care for and train the children while she is absent in the
+discharge of these masculine duties?
+
+If it were proper to reverse the order of nature and assign woman
+to the sterner duties devolved upon the male sex, and to attempt to
+assign man to the more refining, delicate, and ennobling duties of the
+woman, man would be found entirely incompetent to the discharge of
+the obligations which nature has devolved upon the gentler sex, and
+society must be greatly injured by the attempted change. But if we are
+told that the object of this movement is not to reverse this order of
+nature, but only to devolve upon the gentler sex a portion of the more
+rigorous duties imposed by nature upon the stronger sex, we reply that
+society must be injured, as the woman would not be able to discharge
+those duties so well, by reason of her want of physical strength, as
+the male, upon whom they are devolved, and to the extent that the
+duties are to be divided, the male would be infinitely less competent
+to discharge the delicate and sacred trusts which nature has assigned
+to the female.
+
+But it has been said that the present law is unjust to woman; that she
+is often required to pay tax on the property she holds without being
+permitted to take part in framing or administering the laws by
+which her property is governed, and that she is taxed without
+representation. That is a great mistake.
+
+It may be very doubtful whether the male or female sex in the present
+state of things has more influence in the administration of the
+affairs of the Government and the enactment of the laws by which we
+are governed.
+
+While the woman does not discharge military duty, nor does she attend
+courts and serve on juries, nor does she labor on the public streets,
+bridges, or highways, nor does she engage actively and publicly in
+the discussion of political affairs, nor does she enter the crowded
+precincts of the ballot-box to deposit her suffrage, still the
+intelligent, cultivated, noble woman is a power behind the throne. All
+her influence is in favor of morality, justice, and fair dealing, all
+her efforts and her counsel are in favor of good government, wise and
+wholesome regulations, and a faithful administration of the laws. Such
+a woman, by her gentleness, kindness, and Christian bearing, impresses
+her views and her counsels upon her father, her husband, her brothers,
+her sons, and her other male friends who imperceptibly yield to her
+influence many times without even being conscious of it. She rules not
+with a rod of iron, but with the queenly scepter; she binds not with
+hooks of steel but with silken cords; she governs not by physical
+efforts, but by moral suasion and feminine purity and delicacy. Her
+dominion is one of love, not of arbitrary power.
+
+We are satisfied, therefore, that the pure, cultivated, and pious
+ladies of this country now exercise a very powerful, but quiet,
+imperceptible influence in popular affairs, much greater than they
+can ever again exercise if female suffrage should be enacted and they
+should be compelled actively to take part in the affairs of state and
+the corruptions of party politics.
+
+It would be a gratification, and we are always glad to see the ladies
+gratified, to many who have espoused the cause of woman suffrage if
+they could take active part in political affairs, and go to the polls
+and cast their votes alongside the male sex; but while this would be
+a gratification to a large number of very worthy and excellent
+ladies who take a different view of the question from that which we
+entertain, we feel that it would be a great cruelty to a much larger
+number of the cultivated, refined, delicate, and lovely women of
+this country who seek no such distinction, who would enjoy no such
+privilege, who would with woman-like delicacy shrink from the
+discharge of any such obligation, and who would sincerely regret that,
+what they consider the folly of the state, had imposed upon them any
+such unpleasant duties.
+
+But should female suffrage be once established it would become an
+imperative necessity that the very large class, indeed much the
+largest class, of the women of this country of the character last
+described should yield, contrary to their inclinations and wishes, to
+the necessity which would compel them to engage in political strife.
+We apprehend no one who has properly considered this question will
+doubt if female suffrage should be established that the more ignorant
+and less refined portions of the female population of this country,
+to say nothing of the baser class of females, laying aside feminine
+delicacy and disregarding the sacred duties devolving upon them, to
+which we have already referred, would rush to the polls and take
+pleasure in the crowded association which the situation would compel,
+of the two sexes in political meetings, and at the ballot-box.
+
+If all the baser and more ignorant portion of the female sex crowd to
+the polls and deposit their suffrage this compels the very large class
+of intelligent, virtuous, and refined females, including wives and
+mothers, who have much more important duties to perform, to leave
+their sacred labors at home, relinquishing for a time the God-given
+important trust which has been placed in their hands, to go contrary
+to their wishes to the polls and vote, to counteract the suffrage of
+the less worthy class of our female population. If they fail to do
+this the best interests of the country must suffer by a preponderance
+of ignorance and vice at the polls.
+
+It is now a problem which perplexes the brain of the ablest statesmen
+to determine how we will best preserve our republican system as
+against the demoralizing influence of the large class of our present
+citizens and voters who by reason of their illiteracy are unable to
+read or write the ballot they cast.
+
+Certainly no statesman who has carefully observed the situation would
+desire to add very largely to this burden of ignorance. But who
+does not apprehend the fact if universal female suffrage should be
+established that we will, especially in the Southern States, add a
+very large number to the voting population whose ignorance utterly
+disqualifies them for discharging the trust. If our colored population
+who were so recently slaves that even the males who are voters have
+had but little opportunity to educate themselves or to be educated,
+whose ignorance is now exciting the liveliest interest of our
+statesmen, are causes of serious apprehension, what is to be said in
+favor of adding to the voting population all the females of that race,
+who, on account of the situation in which they have been placed, have
+had much less opportunity to be educated than even the males of their
+own race.
+
+We do not say it is their fault that they are not educated, but the
+fact is undeniable that they are grossly ignorant, with very few
+exceptions, and probably not one in a hundred of them could read and
+write the ballot that they would be authorized to cast. What says the
+statesman to the propriety of adding this immense mass of ignorance to
+the voting population of the Union in its present condition?
+
+It may be said that their votes could be offset by the ballots of the
+educated and refined ladies of the white race in the same section;
+but who does not know that the ignorant female voters would be at
+the polls _en masse_, while the refined and educated, shrinking from
+public contact on such occasions, would remain at home and attend to
+their domestic and other important duties, leaving the country too
+often to the control of those who could afford under the circumstances
+to take part in the strifes of politics, and to come in contact with
+the unpleasant surroundings before they could reach the polls. Are
+we ready to expose the country to the demoralization, and our
+institutions to the strain, which would be placed upon them for the
+gratification of a minority of the virtuous and good of our female
+population at the expense of the mortification of a very large
+majority of the same sex?
+
+It has been frequently urged with great earnestness by those who
+advocate woman suffrage that the ballot is necessary to the women to
+enable them to protect themselves in securing occupations, and to
+enable them to realize the same compensation for the like labor which
+is received by men. This argument is plausible, but upon a closer
+examination it will be found to possess but little real force. The
+price of labor is and must continue to be governed by the law of
+supply and demand, and the person who has the most physical strength
+to labor, and the most pursuits requiring such strength open for
+employment, will always command the higher prices.
+
+Ladies make excellent teachers in public schools; many of them are
+every way the equals of their male competitors, and still they secure
+less wages than males. The reason is obvious. The number of ladies who
+offer themselves as teachers is much larger than the number of males
+who are willing to teach. The larger number of females offer to teach
+because other occupations are not open to them. The smaller number of
+males offer to teach because other more profitable occupations are
+open to most males who are competent to teach. The result is that the
+competition for positions of teachers to be filled by ladies is so
+great as to reduce the price: but as males can not be employed at
+that price, and are necessary in certain places in the schools, those
+seeking their services have to pay a higher rate for them.
+
+Persons having a larger number of places open to them with fewer
+competitors command higher wages than those who have a smaller number
+of places open to them with more competitors. This is the law of
+society. It is the law of supply and demand, which can not be changed
+by legislation. Then it follows that the ballot can not enable those
+who have to compete with the larger number to command the same prices
+as those who compete with the smaller number in the labor market. As
+the Legislature has no power to regulate in practice that of which
+the advocates of woman suffrage complain, the ballot in the hands of
+females could not aid its regulation.
+
+The ballot can not impart to the female physical strength which she
+does not possess, nor can it open to her pursuits which she does not
+have physical ability to engage in; and as long as she lacks the
+physical strength to compete with men in the different departments of
+labor, there will be more competition in her department, and she must
+necessarily receive less wages.
+
+But it is claimed again, that females should have the ballot as a
+protection against the tyranny of bad husbands. This is also delusive.
+If the husband is brutal, arbitrary, or tyrannical, and tyrannizes
+over her at home, the ballot in her hands would be no protection
+against such injustice, but the husband who compelled her to conform
+to his wishes in other respects would also compel her to use the
+ballot, if she possessed it, as he might please to dictate. The ballot
+would therefore be of no assistance to the wife in such case, nor
+could it heal family strifes or dissensions. On the contrary, one
+of the gravest objections to placing the ballot in the hands of the
+female sex is that it would promote unhappiness and dissensions in the
+family circle. There should be unity and harmony in the family.
+
+At present the man represents the family in meeting the demands of the
+law and of society upon the family. So far as the rougher, coarser
+duties are concerned, the man represents the family, and the
+individuality of the woman is not brought into prominence; but when
+the ballot is placed in the hands of woman her individuality is
+enlarged, and she is expected to answer for herself the demands of the
+law and of society on her individual account, and not as the weaker
+member of the family to answer by her husband. This naturally draws
+her out from the dignified and cultivated refinement of her womanly
+position, and brings her into a closer contact with the rougher
+elements of society, which tends to destroy that higher reverence and
+respect which her refinement and dignity in the relation of wife
+and mother have always inspired in those who approached her in her
+honorable and useful retirement.
+
+When she becomes a voter she will be more or less of a politician, and
+will form political alliances or unite with political parties which
+will frequently be antagonistic to those to which her husband
+belongs. This will introduce into the family circle new elements
+of disagreement and discord which will frequently end in unhappy
+divisions, if not in separation or divorce. This must frequently occur
+when she becomes an active politician, identified with a party which
+is distasteful to her husband. On the other hand, if she unites with
+her husband in party associations and votes with him on all occasions
+so as not to disturb the harmony and happiness of the family, then the
+ballot is of no service as it simply duplicates the vote of the male
+on each side of the question and leaves the result the same.
+
+Again, if the family is the unit of society, and the state is composed
+of an aggregation of families, then it is important to society that
+there be as many happy families as possible, and it becomes the duty
+of man and woman alike to unite in the holy relations of matrimony.
+
+As this is the only legal and proper mode of rendering obedience to
+the early command to multiply and replenish the earth, whatever tends
+to discourage the holy relation of matrimony is in disobedience of
+this command, and any change which encourages such disobedience is
+violative of the Divine law, and can not result in advantage to the
+state. Before forming this relation it is the duty of young men who
+have to take upon themselves the responsibilities of providing for and
+protecting the family to select some profession or pursuit that is
+most congenial to their tastes, and in which they will be most likely
+to be successful; but this can not be permitted to the young ladies,
+or if permitted it can not be practically carried out after matrimony.
+
+As it might frequently happen that the young man had selected one
+profession or pursuit, and the young lady another, the result would
+be that after marriage she must drop the profession or pursuit of her
+choice, and employ herself in the sacred duties of wife and mother at
+home, and in rearing, educating, and elevating the family, while the
+husband pursues the profession of his choice.
+
+It may be said, however, that there is a class of young ladies who
+do not choose to marry, and who select professions or avocations and
+follow them for a livelihood. This is true, but this class, compared
+with the number who unite in matrimony with the husbands of their
+choice, is comparatively very small, and it is the duty of society to
+encourage the increase of marriages rather than of celibacy. If the
+larger number of females select pursuits or professions which require
+them to decline marriage, society to that extent is deprived of the
+advantage resulting from the increase of population by marriage.
+
+It is said by those who have examined the question closely that the
+largest number of divorces is now found in the communities where
+the advocates of female suffrage are most numerous, and where the
+individuality of woman as related to her husband, which such a
+doctrine inculcates, is increased to the greatest extent.
+
+If this be true, it is a strong plea in the interests of the family
+and of society against granting the petition of the advocates of woman
+suffrage.
+
+After all, this is a local question, which properly belongs to the
+different States of the Union, each acting for itself, and to the
+Territories of the Union, when not acting in conflict with the laws of
+the United States.
+
+The fact that a State adopts the rule of female suffrage neither
+increases nor diminishes its power in the Union, as the number of
+Representatives in Congress to which each State is entitled and the
+number of members in the electoral college appointed by each is
+determined by its aggregate population and not by the proportion of
+its voting population, so long as no race or class as defined by the
+Constitution is excluded from the exercise of the right of suffrage.
+
+Now, Mr. President, I shall make no apology for adding to what I have
+said some extracts from an able and well-written volume, entitled
+"Letters from the Chimney Corner," written by a highly cultivated lady
+of Chicago. This gifted lady has discussed the question with so much
+clearness and force that I can make no mistake by substituting some
+of the thoughts taken from her book for anything I might add on this
+question. While discussing the relations of the sexes, and showing
+that neither sex is of itself a whole, a unit, and that each requires
+to be supplemented by the other before its true structural integrity
+can be achieved, she adds:
+
+Now, everywhere throughout nature, to the male and female ideal,
+certain distinct powers and properties belong. The lines of
+demarkation are not always clear, not always straight lines: they are
+frequently wavering, shadowy, and difficult to follow, yet on the
+whole whatever physical strength, personal aggressiveness, the
+intellectual scope and vigor which manage vast material enterprises
+are emphasized, there the masculine ideal is present. On the other
+hand, wherever refinement, tenderness, delicacy, sprightliness,
+spiritual acumen, and force, are to the fore, there the feminine ideal
+is represented, and these terms will be found nearly enough for all
+practical purposes to represent the differing endowments of actual men
+and women. Different powers suggest different activities, and under
+the division of labor here indicated the control of the state,
+legislation, the power of the ballot, would seem to fall to the share
+of man. Nor does this decision carry with it any injustice, any
+robbery of just or natural right to woman.
+
+In her hands is placed a moral and spiritual power far greater than
+the power of the ballot. In her married or reproductive state the
+forming and shaping of human souls in their most plastic period is her
+destiny. Nor do her labors or her responsibilities end with infancy or
+childhood. Throughout his entire course, from the cradle to the grave,
+man is ever under the moral and spiritual influence and control of
+woman. With this power goes a tremendous responsibility for its true
+management and use. If woman shall ever rise to the full height of her
+power and privileges in this direction, she will have enough of the
+world's work upon her hands without attempting legislation.
+
+It may be argued that the possession of civil power confers dignity,
+and is of itself a re-enforcement of whatever natural power an
+individual may possess; but the dignity of womanhood, when it is fully
+understood and appreciated, needs no such re-enforcement, nor are the
+peculiar needs of woman such as the law can reach.
+
+Whenever laws are needed for the protection of her legal status and
+rights, there has been found to be little difficulty in obtaining them
+by means of the votes of men; but the deeper and more vital needs of
+woman and of society are those which are outside altogether of the
+pale of the law, and which can only be reached by the moral forces
+lodged in the hands of woman herself, acting in an enlarged and
+general capacity.
+
+For instance, whenever a man or woman has been wronged in marriage the
+law may indeed step in with a divorce, but does that divorce give back
+to either party the dream of love, the happy home, the prattle of
+children, and the sweet outlook for future years which were destroyed
+by that wrong? It is not a legal power which is needed in this case;
+it is a moral power which shall prevent the wrong, or, if committed,
+shall induce penitence, forgiveness, a purer life, and the healing of
+the wound.
+
+This power has been lodged by the Creator in the hands of woman
+herself, and if she has not been rightly trained to use it there is
+no redress for her at the hands of the law. The law alone can never
+compel men to respect the chastity of woman. They must first recognize
+its value in themselves by living up to the high level of their duties
+as maidens, wives, and mothers; they must impress men with the beauty
+and sacredness of purity, and then whatever laws are necessary
+and available for its protection will be easily obtained, with
+a certainty, also, that they can be enforced, because the moral
+sentiments of men will be enlisted in their support.
+
+Privileges bring responsibilities, and before women clamor for more
+work to do, it were better that they should attend more thoughtfully
+to the duties which lie all about them, in the home and social circle.
+Until society is cleansed of the moral foulness which infests it,
+which, as we have seen, lies beyond the reach of civil law, women have
+no call to go forth into wider fields, claiming to be therein the
+rightful and natural purifiers. Let them first make the home sweet and
+pure, and the streams which flow therefrom will sweeten and purify all
+the rest.
+
+As between the power of the ballot and this moral force exerted by
+women there can not be an instant's doubt as to the choice. In natural
+refinement and elevation of character, the ideal woman stands a step
+above the ideal man. If she descends from this fortunate position to
+take part in the coarse scramble for material power, what chance will
+she have as against man's aggressive forces; and what can she possibly
+gain that she can not win more directly, more effectually, and with
+far more dignity and glory to herself by the exercise of her own
+womanly prerogatives? She has, under God, the formation and rearing of
+men in her own hands.
+
+If they do not turn out in the end to be men who respect woman, who
+will protect and defend her in the exercise of every one of her
+God-given rights, it is because she has failed in her duty toward
+them; has not been taught to comprehend her own power and to use it
+to its best ends. For women to seek to control men by the power of
+suffrage is like David essaying the armor of Saul. What woman needs is
+her own sheepskin sling and her few smooth pebbles from the bed of the
+brook, and then let her go forth in the name of the Lord God of Hosts,
+and a victory as sure and decisive as that of the shepherd of Israel
+awaits her.
+
+Again, in chapter 4, entitled "The Power of the Home," the author
+says, in substance: It is, perhaps, of minor consequence that women
+should have felt themselves emancipated from buttons and bread
+making; but that they should have learned to look in the least degree
+slightingly upon the great duties of women as lovers of husbands, as
+lovers of children, as the fountain and source of what is highest and
+purest and holiest, and not less of what is homely and comfortable and
+satisfying in the home, is a serious misfortune. Women can hardly
+be said to have lost, perhaps what they have so rarely in any age
+generally attained, that dignity which knows how to command, united
+with a sweetness which seems all the while to be complying, the power,
+supple and strong, which rescues the character of the ideal woman from
+the charge of weakness, and at the same time exhibits its utmost of
+grace and fascination.
+
+But that of late years the gift has not been cultivated, has not, in
+fact, thrown out such natural off-shoots as gave grace and glory to
+some earlier social epochs, must be evident, it would seem, to any
+thoughtful observer.
+
+If, instead of trying to grasp more material power, women would pursue
+those studies and investigations which tend to make them familiar with
+what science teaches concerning the influence of the mother and the
+home upon the child; of how completely the Creator in giving the
+genesis of the human race into the hands of woman has made her not
+only capable of, but responsible for, the regeneration of the world;
+if they would reflect that nature by making man the bond slave of his
+passions has put the lever into the hands of woman by which she can
+control him, and if they would learn to use these powers, not as bad
+women do for vile and selfish ends, but as the mothers of the race
+ought, for pure, holy, and redemptive purposes, then would the sphere
+of women be enlarged to some purpose; the atmosphere of the home would
+be purified and vitalized, and the work of redeeming man from his
+vices would be hopefully begun.
+
+The following thoughts are also from the same source: Is this
+emancipation of woman, if that is the proper phrase for it, a final
+end, or only the means to an end? Are women to be as the outcome of it
+emancipated from their world-old sphere of marriage and motherhood,
+and control of the moral and spiritual destinies of the race, or are
+they to be emancipated, in order to the proper fulfillment of these
+functions? It would seem that most of the advanced women of the day
+would answer the first of these questions affirmatively. Women, I
+think it has been authoritatively stated, are to be emancipated in
+order that they may become fully developed human beings, something
+broader and stronger, something higher and finer, more delicate,
+more aesthetic, more generally rarefied and sublimated than the
+old-fashioned type of womanhood, the wife and the mother.
+
+And the result of the woman movement seems more or less in a line thus
+far with this theoretic aim. Of advanced women a less proportion are
+inclined to marry than of the old-fashioned type; of those who do
+marry a great proportion are restless in marriage bonds or seek
+release from them, while of those who do remain in married life many
+bear no children, and few, indeed, become mothers of large families.
+The woman's vitality is concentrated in the brain and fructifies more
+in intellectual than in physical forms.
+
+Now, women who do not marry are one of two things; either they belong
+to a class which we shrink from naming or they become old maids.
+
+An old maid may be in herself a very useful and commendable person and
+a valuable member of society; many are all this. But she has still
+this sad drawback, she can not perpetuate herself; and since all
+history and observation go to prove that the great final end of
+creation, whatever it may be, can only be achieved through the
+perpetuity and increasing progress of the race, it follows that
+unmarried woman is not the most necessary, the indispensable type of
+woman. If there were no other class of females left upon the earth but
+the women who do not bear children, then the world would be a failure,
+creation would be nonplussed.
+
+If, then, the movement for the emancipation of woman has for its final
+end the making of never so fine a quality, never so sublimated a sort
+of non-child-bearing women, it is an absurdity upon the face of it.
+
+From the standpoint of the Chimney Corner it appears that too many
+even of the most gifted and liberal-minded of the leaders in the
+woman's rights movement have not yet discovered this flaw in their
+logic. They seek to individualize women, not seeing, apparently,
+that individualized women, old maids, and individualized men, old
+bachelors, though they may be useful in certain minor ways, are, after
+all, to speak with the relentlessness of science, fragmentary and
+abortive, so far as the great scheme of the universe is concerned, and
+often become, in addition, seriously detrimental to the right progress
+of society. The man and woman united in marriage form the unit of the
+race; they alone rightly wield the self-perpetuating power upon which
+all human progress depends; without which the race itself must perish,
+the universe become null.
+
+Reaching this point of the argument, it becomes evident that while the
+development of the individual man or individual woman is no doubt of
+great importance, since, as Margaret Fuller has justly said, "there
+must be units before there can be union," it is chiefly so because of
+their relation to each other. Their character should be developed
+with a view to their future union with each other, and not to be
+independent of it. When the leaders of the woman's movement fully
+realize this, and shape their course accordingly, they will have made
+a great advance both in the value of their work and its claim upon
+public sympathy. Moreover, they will have reached a point from which
+it will be possible for them to investigate reform and idealize the
+relations existing between men and women.
+
+Mr. President, it is no part of my purpose in any manner whatever
+to speak disrespectfully of the large number of intelligent ladies,
+sometimes called strong-minded, who are constantly going before the
+public, agitating this question of female suffrage. While some of them
+may, as is frequently charged, be courting notoriety, I have no
+doubt they are generally earnestly engaged in a work which, in their
+opinion, would better their condition and would do no injury to
+society.
+
+In all this, however, I believe they are mistaken.
+
+I think the mental and physical structure of the sexes, of itself,
+sufficiently demonstrates the fact that the sterner, more laborious,
+and more difficult duties of society are to be performed by the male
+sex; while the more delicate duties of life, which require less
+physical strength, and the proper training of youth, with the proper
+discharge of domestic duties, belong to the female sex. Nature has so
+arranged it that the male sex can not attend properly to the duties
+assigned by the law of nature to the female sex, and that the female
+sex can not discharge the more rigorous duties required of the male
+sex.
+
+This movement is an attempt to reverse the very laws of our being,
+and to drag woman into an arena for which she is not suited, and to
+devolve upon her onerous duties which the Creator never intended that
+she should perform.
+
+While the husband discharges the laborious and fatiguing duties of
+important official positions, and conducts political campaigns, and
+discharges the duties connected with the ballot-box, or while he bears
+arms in time of war, or discharges executive or judicial duties, or
+the duties of juryman, requiring close confinement and many times
+great mental fatigue; or while the husband in a different sphere of
+life discharges the laborious duties of the plantation, the workshop,
+or the machine shop, it devolves upon the wife to attend to the duties
+connected with home life, to care for infant children, and to train
+carefully and properly those who in the youthful period are further
+advanced towards maturity.
+
+The woman with the infant at the breast is in no condition to plow
+on the farm, labor hard in the workshop, discharge the duties of a
+juryman, conduct causes as an advocate in court, preside in important
+cases as a judge, command armies as a general, or bear arms as a
+private. These duties, and others of like character, belong to the
+male sex; while the more important duties of home, to which I have
+already referred, devolve upon the female sex. We can neither reverse
+the physical nor the moral laws of our nature, and as this movement is
+an attempt to reverse these laws, and to devolve upon the female
+sex important and laborious duties for which they are not by nature
+physically competent, I am not prepared to support this bill.
+
+My opinion is that a very large majority of the American people, yes,
+a large majority of the female sex, oppose it, and that they act
+wisely in doing so. I therefore protest against its passage.
+
+
+
+Mr. DOLPH. Mr. President, I shall not detain the Senate long. I do
+not feel satisfied when a measure so important to the people of this
+country and to humanity is about to be submitted to a vote of the
+Senate to remain wholly silent.
+
+The pending question is upon the adoption of a joint resolution in the
+usual form submitting to the legislatures of the several States of the
+Union for their ratification an additional article as an amendment to
+the Federal Constitution, which is as follows:
+
+    ARTICLE--,
+
+    SECTION I. The right of citizens of the United States to vote
+    shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
+    State on account of sex.
+
+    SEC. 2. The Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation,
+    to enforce the provisions of this article.
+
+Fortunately for the perpetuity of our institutions and the prosperity
+of the people, the Federal Constitution contains a provision for its
+own amendment. The framers of that instrument foresaw that time and
+experience, the growth of the country and the consequent expansion of
+the Government, would develop the necessity for changes in it, and
+they therefore wisely provided in Article V as follows:
+
+    The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it
+    necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on
+    the application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several
+    States, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which in
+    either case shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part
+    of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of
+    three-fourths of the several States, or by conventions in
+    three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of
+    ratification may be proposed by the Congress.
+
+Under this provision, at the first session of the First Congress, ten
+amendments were submitted to the Legislatures of the several States,
+in due time ratified by the constitutional number of States, and
+became a part of the Constitution. Since then there have been added to
+the Constitution by the same process five different articles.
+
+To secure an amendment to the Constitution under this article requires
+the concurrent action of two-thirds of both branches of Congress and
+the affirmative action of three-fourths of the States. Of course
+Congress can refuse to submit a proposed amendment to the Legislatures
+of the several States, no matter how general the demand for such
+submission may be, but I am inclined to believe with the senior
+Senator from New Hampshire [Mr. BLAIR], in the proposition submitted
+by him in a speech he made early in the present session upon the
+pending resolution, that the question as to whether this resolution
+shall be submitted to the Legislatures of the several States for
+ratification does not involve the right or policy of the proposed
+amendment. I am also inclined to believe with him that should
+the demand by the people for the submission by Congress to the
+Legislatures of the several States of a proposed amendment become
+general it would he the duty of the Congress to submit such amendment
+irrespective of the individual views of the members of Congress, and
+thus give the people through their Legislative Assemblies power to
+pass upon the question as to whether or not the Constitution should be
+amended. At all events, for myself, I should not hesitate to vote to
+submit for ratification by the Legislatures of the several States an
+amendment to the Constitution although opposed to it if I thought the
+demand for it justified such a course.
+
+But I shall vote for the pending joint resolution because I am in
+favor of the proposed amendment. I have been for many years convinced
+that the demand made by women for the right of suffrage is just, and
+that of all the distinctions which have been made between citizens in
+the laws which confer or regulate suffrage the distinction of sex is
+the least defensible.
+
+I am not going to discuss the question at length at this time. The
+arguments for and against woman suffrage have been often stated in
+this Chamber, and are pretty fully set forth in the majority and
+minority reports of the Senate committee upon the pending joint
+resolution. The arguments in its favor were fully stated by the senior
+Senator from New Hampshire in his able speech upon the question before
+alluded to, and now the objections to it have been forcibly and
+elaborately presented by the senior Senator from Georgia [Mr. BROWN].
+I could not expect by anything I could say to change a single vote in
+this body, and the public is already fully informed upon the question,
+as the arguments in favor of woman suffrage have been voiced in every
+hamlet in the land with great ability. No question in this country has
+been more ably discussed than this has been by the women themselves.
+
+I do not think a single objection which is made to woman suffrage is
+tenable. No one will contend but that women have sufficient capacity
+to vote intelligently.
+
+Sir, sacred and profane history is full of the records of great deeds
+by women. They have ruled kingdoms, and, my friend from Georgia to
+the contrary notwithstanding, they have commanded armies. They have
+excelled in statecraft, they have shone in literature, and, rising
+superior to their environments and breaking the shackles with which
+custom and tyranny have bound them, they have stood side by side with
+men in the fields of the arts and the sciences.
+
+If it were a fact that woman is intellectually inferior to man, which
+I do not admit, still that would be no reason why she should not
+be permitted to participate in the formation and control of the
+Government to which she owes allegiance. If we are to have as a test
+for the exercise of the right of suffrage a qualification based upon
+intelligence, let it be applied to women and to men alike. If it be
+admitted that suffrage is a right, that is the end of controversy;
+there can no longer be any argument made against woman suffrage,
+because, if it is her right, then, if there were but one poor woman
+in all the United States demanding the right of suffrage, it would be
+tyranny to refuse the demand.
+
+But our friends say that suffrage is not a right; that it is a matter
+of grace only; that it is a privilege which is conferred upon or
+withheld from individual members of society by society at pleasure.
+Society as here used means man's government, and the proposition
+assumes the fact that men have a right to institute and control
+governments for themselves and for women. I admit that in the
+governments of the world, past and present, men as a rule have assumed
+to be the ruling classes; that they have instituted governments from
+participation in which they have excluded women; that they have made
+laws for themselves and for women, and as a rule have themselves
+administered them; but that the provisions conferring or regulating
+suffrage in the constitutions and laws of governments so constituted
+determined the question of the right of suffrage can not be
+maintained.
+
+Let us suppose, if we can, a community separated from all other
+communities, having no organized government, owing no allegiance to
+any existing governments, without any knowledge of the character
+of present or past governments, so that when they come to form a
+government for themselves they can do so free from the bias or
+prejudice of custom or education, composed of an equal number of
+men and women, having equal property rights to be defined and to
+be protected by law. When such community came to institute a
+government--and it would have an undoubted right to institute a
+government for itself, and the instinct of self-preservation would
+soon lead them to do so--will my friend from Georgia tell me by what
+right, human or divine, the male portion of that community could
+exclude the female portion, although equal in number and having equal
+property rights with the men, from participation in the formation of
+such government and in the enactment of laws for the government of the
+community? I understand the Senator, if he should answer, would
+say that he believes the Author of our existence, the Ruler of the
+universe, has given different spheres to man and woman. Admit that;
+and still neither in nature nor in the revealed will of God do I find
+anything to lead me to believe that the Creator did not intend that a
+woman should exercise the right of suffrage.
+
+During the consideration by this body at the last session of the bill
+to admit Washington Territory into the Union, referring to the
+fact that in that Territory woman had been enfranchised, I briefly
+submitted my views on this subject, which I ask the Secretary to read,
+so that it may be incorporated in my remarks.
+
+The Secretary read as follows:
+
+    Mr. President, there is another matter which I consider pertinent
+    to this discussion, and of too much importance to be left entirely
+    unnoticed on this occasion. It is something new in our political
+    history. It is full of hope for the women of this country and
+    of the world, and full of promise for the future of republican
+    institutions. I refer to the fact that in Washington Territory the
+    right of suffrage has been extended to women of proper age, and
+    that the delegates to the constitutional convention to be held
+    under the provisions of this bill, should it become a law, will,
+    under existing laws of the Territory, be elected by its citizens
+    without distinction as to sex, and the constitution to be
+    submitted to the people will be passed upon in like manner.
+
+    I do not intend to discuss the question of woman suffrage upon
+    this occasion, and I refer to it mainly for the purpose of
+    directing attention to the advanced position which the people of
+    this Territory have taken upon this question. I do not believe
+    the proposition so often asserted that suffrage is a political
+    privilege only, and not a natural right. It is regulated by
+    the constitution and laws of a State I grant, but it needs no
+    argument, it appears to me, to show that a constitution and laws
+    adopted and enacted by a fragment of the whole body of the people,
+    but binding alike on all, is a usurpation of the powers of
+    government.
+
+
+    Government is but organized society. Whatever its form, it has its
+    origin in the necessities of mankind and is indispensable for
+    the maintenance of civilized society. It is essential to every
+    government that it should represent the supreme power of the
+    State, and be capable of subjecting the will of its individual
+    citizens to its authority. Such a government can only derive
+    its just powers from the consent of the governed, and can be
+    established only under a fundamental law which is self-imposed.
+    Every citizen of suitable age and discretion who is to be subject
+    to such a government has, in my judgment, a natural right to
+    participate in its formation. It is a significant fact that should
+    Congress pass this bill and authorize the people of Washington
+    Territory to frame a State constitution and organize a State
+    government, the fundamental law of the State will be made by all
+    the citizens of the State to be subject to it, and not by one-half
+    of them. And we shall witness the spectacle of a State government
+    founded in accordance with the principles of equality, and have a
+    State at last with a truly republican form of government.
+
+    The fathers of the Republic enunciated the doctrine "that all men
+    are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
+    certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
+    and the pursuit of happiness." It is strange that any one in this
+    enlightened age should be found to contend that this declaration
+    is true only of men, and that a man is endowed by his Creator with
+    inalienable rights not possessed by a woman. The lamented Lincoln
+    immortalized the expression that ours is a Government "of the
+    people, by the people, and for the people," and yet it is far from
+    that. There can be no government by the people where one-half
+    of them are allowed no voice in its organization and control. I
+    regard the struggle going on in this country and elsewhere for
+    the enfranchisement of women as but a continuation of the great
+    struggle for human liberty which has, from the earliest dawn of
+    authentic history, convulsed nations, rent kingdoms, and drenched
+    battlefields with human blood. I look upon the victories which
+    have been achieved in the cause of woman's enfranchisement in
+    Washington Territory and elsewhere as the crowning victories of
+    all which have been won in the long-continued, still-continuing
+    contest between liberty and oppression, and as destined to exert a
+    greater influence upon the human race than any achieved upon the
+    battlefield in ancient or modern times.
+
+Mr. DOLPH. Mr. President, the movement for woman suffrage has passed
+the stage of ridicule. The pending joint resolution may not pass
+during this Congress, but the time is not far distant when in every
+State of the Union and in every Territory women will be admitted to
+an equal voice in the government, and that will be done whether the
+Federal Constitution is amended or not. The first convention demanding
+suffrage for women was held at Seneca Falls, in the State of New York,
+in 1848. To-day in three of the Territories of the Union women enjoy
+full suffrage, in a large number of States and Territories they
+are entitled to vote at school meetings, and in all the States and
+Territories there is a growing sentiment in favor of this measure
+which will soon compel respectful consideration by the law-making
+power.
+
+No measure in this country involving such radical changes in our
+institutions and fraught with so great consequences to this country
+and to humanity has made such progress as the movement for woman
+suffrage. Denunciation will not much longer answer for arguments by
+the opponents of this measure. The portrayal of the evils to flow from
+woman suffrage such as we have heard pictured to-day by the Senator
+from Georgia, the loss of harmony between husband and wife, and the
+consequent instability of the marriage relation, the neglect of
+husband and children by wives and mothers for the performance of their
+political duties, in short the incapacitating of women for wives and
+mothers and companions, will not much longer serve to frighten the
+timid. Proof is better than theory. The experiment has been tried
+and the predicted evils to flow from it have not followed. On the
+contrary, if we can believe the almost universal testimony, everywhere
+where it has been tried it has been followed by the most beneficial
+results.
+
+In Washington Territory, since woman was enfranchised, there have been
+two elections. At the first there were 8,368 votes cast by women out
+of a total vote of 34,000 and over. At the second election, which was
+held in November last, out of 48,000 votes cast in the Territory,
+12,000 votes were cast by women. The opponents of female suffrage
+are silenced there. The Territorial conventions of both parties have
+resolved in favor of woman suffrage, and there is not a proposition,
+so far as I know in all that Territory, to repeal the law conferring
+suffrage upon woman.
+
+I desire also to inform my friend from Georgia that since women were
+enfranchised in Washington Territory nature has continued in her
+wonted courses. The sun rises and sets; there is seed-time and
+harvest; seasons come and go. The population has increased with the
+usual regularity and rapidity. Marriages have been quite as frequent,
+and divorces have been no more so. Women have not lost their influence
+for good upon society, but men have been elevated and refined. If we
+are to believe the testimony which comes from lawyers, physicians,
+ministers of the gospel, merchants, mechanics, farmers, and laboring
+men, the united testimony of the entire people of the Territory, the
+results of woman suffrage there have been all that could be desired by
+its friends. Some of the results in that Territory have been seen
+in making the polls quiet and orderly, in awaking a new interest in
+educational questions and in questions of moral reform, in securing
+the passage of beneficial laws and the proper enforcement of them;
+and, as I have said before, in elevating men, and that without injury
+to the women.
+
+Mr. EUSTIS. Will the Senator allow me to ask him a question?
+
+Mr. DOLPH. The Senator can ask me a question, if he chooses.
+
+Mr. EUSTIS. If it be right and proper to confer the right of suffrage
+on women, I ask the Senator whether he does not think that women ought
+to be required to serve on juries?
+
+Mr. DOLPH. I can answer that very readily. It does not necessarily
+follow that because a woman is permitted to vote and thus have a voice
+in making the laws by which she is to be governed and by which her
+property rights are to be determined, she must perform such duty as
+service upon a jury. But I will inform the Senator that in Washington
+Territory she does serve upon juries, and with great satisfaction
+to the judges of the courts and to all parties who desire to see an
+honest and efficient administration of law.
+
+Mr. EUSTIS. I was aware of the fact that women are required to serve
+on juries in Washington Territory because they are allowed to vote.
+I understand that under all State laws those duties are considered
+correlative. Now, I ask the Senator whether he thinks it is a decent
+spectacle to take a mother away from her nursing infant and lock her
+up all night to sit on a jury?
+
+Mr. DOLPH. I intended to say before I reached this point of being
+interrogated that I not only do not believe that there is a single
+argument against woman suffrage that is tenable, and I may be
+prejudiced in the matter, but that there is not a single one that is
+really worthy of any serious consideration. The Senator from Louisiana
+is a lawyer, and he knows very well that under such circumstances, a
+mother with a nursing infant, that fact being made known to the court
+would be excused; that would be a sufficient excuse. He knows himself,
+and he has seen it done a hundred times, that for trivial excuses
+compared to that men have been excused from service on a jury.
+
+Mr. EUSTIS. I will ask the Senator whether he knows that under the
+laws of Washington Territory that is a legal excuse from serving on a
+jury?
+
+Mr. DOLPH. I am not prepared to state that it is; but there is no
+question in the world but that any judge, that fact being made known,
+would excuse a woman from attendance upon a jury. No special authority
+would be required. I will state further that I have not learned that
+there has been any serious objection on the part of any woman summoned
+for jury service in that Territory to perform that duty. I have not
+learned that it has worked to the disadvantage of any family in the
+Territory; but I do know that the judges of the courts have taken
+especial pains to commend the women who have been called to serve upon
+juries for the manner in which they have discharged their duty.
+
+I wish to say further that there is no connection whatever between
+jury service and the right of suffrage. The question as to who shall
+perform jury service, the question as to who shall perform military
+service, the question as to who shall perform civil official duty in
+a government is certainly a matter to be regulated by the community
+itself; but the question of the right to participate in the formation
+of a government which controls the life and the property and the
+destinies of its citizens, I contend is a question of right that goes
+back of these mere regulations for the protection of property and the
+punishment of offenses under the laws. It is a matter of right which
+it is tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.
+
+Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying: God speed the day when
+not only in all the States of the Union and in all the Territories,
+but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last
+shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last
+disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance, not only in
+respect to the right of suffrage, but in every other respect the peer
+and equal of her brother, man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. VEST. Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects
+popular government based on the will of the people as expressed
+through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so. If this
+Government, which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall
+ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature, or corrupt
+suffrage. If the ship of state launched by our fathers shall ever be
+destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared
+suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures
+and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When
+any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with
+this privilege it is used, accomplished, and eternal.
+
+The Senator who last spoke on this question refers to the successful
+experiment in regard to woman-suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming
+and Washington. Mr. President, it is not upon the plains of the
+sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be
+tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely settled regions
+of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when
+corrupt everywhere else. The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the
+cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends
+everywhere in all history. Whilst the country has been pure and
+patriotic, the cities have been the first cancers to appear upon the
+body-politic in all ages of the world.
+
+Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities?
+Where are the localities in these Territories where the strain upon
+popular government must come? The Senator from New Hampshire, who is
+so conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months
+since by his ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States. He
+proposes that $77,000,000 of the people's money be taken in order to
+strike down the great foe to republican government, illiteracy. How
+was that illiteracy brought upon this country? It was by giving the
+suffrage to unprepared voters. It is not my purpose to go back into
+the past and make any partisan or sectional appeal, but it is a fact
+known to every intelligent man that in one single act the right of
+suffrage was given without preparation to hundreds of thousands of
+voters who to-day can scarcely read. That Senator proposes now to
+double, and more than double, that illiteracy. He proposes to give the
+negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly unprepared as
+they are for it.
+
+In a convention some two years and a half ago in the city of
+Louisville an intelligent negro from the South said the negro men
+could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live
+with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the
+railroad cars. They go to the cities and by attrition they wear
+away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their
+emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when
+suffrage is given them what must be the result?
+
+Mr. President, it is not my purpose to speak of the inconveniences,
+for they are nothing more, of woman suffrage. I trust that as a
+gentleman I respect the feelings of the ladies and their advocates. I
+am not here to ridicule. My purpose only is to use legitimate argument
+as to a movement which commands respectful consideration, if for no
+other reason than because it comes from women. But it is impossible
+to divest ourselves of a certain degree of sentiment when considering
+this question.
+
+I pity the man who can consider any question affecting the influence
+of woman with the cold, dry logic of business. What man can, without
+aversion, turn from the blessed memory of that dear old grandmother,
+or the gentle words and caressing hand of that blessed mother gone to
+the unknown world, to face in its stead the idea of a female justice
+of the peace or township constable? For my part I want when I go to my
+home--when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what
+we call the prizes of this paltry world--I want to go back, not to be
+received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but
+to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go
+back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a
+lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon the construction of the
+Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life
+and domestic love.
+
+I have said I would not speak of the inconveniences to arise from
+woman suffrage--I care not--whether the mother is called upon to
+decide as a juryman or jury-woman rights of property or rights of
+life, whilst her baby is "mewling and puking" in solitary confinement
+at home. There are other considerations more important, and one of
+them to my mind is insuperable. I speak now respecting women as a sex.
+I believe that they are better than men, but I do not believe they are
+adapted to the political work of this world. I do not believe that the
+Great Intelligence ever intended them to invade the sphere of work
+given to men, tearing down and destroying all the best influences for
+which God has intended them.
+
+The great evil in this country to-day is in emotional suffrage. The
+great danger to-day is in excitable suffrage. If the voters of this
+country could think always coolly, and if they could deliberate, if
+they could go by judgment and not by passion, our institutions would
+survive forever, eternal as the foundations of the continent itself;
+but massed together, subject to the excitements of mobs and of these
+terrible political contests that come upon us from year to year under
+the autonomy of our Government, what would be the result if suffrage
+were given to the women of the United States?
+
+Women are essentially emotional. It is no disparagement to them they
+are so. It is no more insulting to say that women are emotional than
+to say that they are delicately constructed physically and unfitted to
+become soldiers or workmen under the sterner, harder pursuits of life.
+
+What we want in this country is to avoid emotional suffrage, and what
+we need is to put more logic into public affairs and less feeling.
+There are spheres in which feeling should be paramount. There are
+kingdoms in which the heart should reign supreme. That kingdom belongs
+to woman. The realm of sentiment, the realm of love, the realm of the
+gentler and the holier and kindlier attributes that make the name of
+wife, mother, and sister next to that of God himself.
+
+I would not, and I say it deliberately, degrade woman by giving her
+the right of suffrage. I mean the word in its full signification,
+because I believe that woman as she is to-day, the queen of home and
+of hearts, is above the political collisions of this world, and should
+always be kept above them.
+
+Sir, if it be said to us that this is a natural right belonging to
+women, I deny it. The right of suffrage is one to be determined by
+expediency and by policy, and given by the State to whom it pleases.
+It is not a natural right; it is a right that comes from the state.
+
+It is claimed that if the suffrage be given to women it is to protect
+them. Protect them from whom? The brute that would invade their rights
+would coerce the suffrage of his wife, or sister, or mother as he
+would wring from her the hard earnings of her toil to gratify his own
+beastly appetites and passions.
+
+It is said that the suffrage is to be given to enlarge the sphere of
+woman's influence. Mr. President, it would destroy her influence.
+It would take her down from that pedestal where she is to-day,
+influencing as a mother the minds of her offspring, influencing by her
+gentle and kindly caress the action of her husband toward the good and
+pure.
+
+But I rise not to discuss this question, but to discharge a request.
+I know that when a man attacks this claim for woman suffrage he is
+sneered at and ridiculed as afraid to meet women in the contests for
+political honor and supremacy. If so, I oppose to the request of these
+ladies the arguments of their own sex; but first, I ask the Secretary
+to read a paper which has been sent to me with a request that I place
+it before the Senate.
+
+The Chief Clerk read as follows:
+
+_To the honorable Senate and House of Representatives_:
+
+We, the undersigned, respectfully remonstrate against the further
+extension of suffrage to women.
+
+H.P. Kidder.
+O.W. Peabody.
+R.M. Morse, jr.
+Charles A. Welch.
+Augustus Lowell.
+Francis Parkman, LL.D.
+Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
+Edmund Dwight.
+Charles H. Dalton.
+Henry Lee.
+W. Endicott, jr.
+Samuel Wells.
+Hon. John Lowell.
+William G. Russell.
+John C. Ropes.
+Robert D. Smith.
+George A. Gardner.
+F. Haven, jr.
+W. Powell Mason.
+B.F. Stevens.
+Charles Marsh.
+Charles W. Eliot, president, Harvard University.
+Prof. C.F. Dunbar.
+Prof. J.P. Cook.
+Prof. J. Lovering.
+Prof. W.W. Goodwin.
+Prof. Francis Bowen.
+Prof. Wolcott Gibbs.
+Prof. F.J. Child.
+Prof. John Trowbridge.
+Prof. G.I. Goodale.
+Prof. J.B. Greenough.
+Prof. H.W. Torrey.
+Prof. J.H. Thayer.
+Prof. E.W. Gurney.
+Justin Winsor.
+H.W. Paine.
+Hon. W.E. Russell.
+James C. Fiske.
+George Putnam.
+C.A. Curtis.
+T. Jefferson Coolidge.
+T.K. Lothrop.
+Augustus P. Loring.
+W.F. Draper.
+George Draper.
+Francis Brooks.
+Rev. J.P. Bodfish, chancellor, Cathedral Holy Cross.
+Rt. Rev. B.H. Paddock, bishop of Massachusetts.
+Rev. Henry M. Dexter.
+Rev. H. Brooke Herford.
+Rev. O.B. Frothingham.
+Rev. Ellis Wendell.
+Rev. Geo. F. Staunton.
+Rev. A.H. Heath.
+Rev. W.H. Dowden.
+Rev. J.B. Seabury.
+Rev. C. Woodworth.
+Rev. Leonard K. Storrs.
+Rev. Howard N. Brown.
+Rev. Edward J. Young.
+Rev. Andrew P. Peabody.
+Rev. George Z. Gray.
+Rev. William Lawrence.
+Rev. E.H. Hall.
+Rev. Nicholas Hoppin.
+Rev. David G. Haskins.
+Rev. L.S. Crawford.
+Rev. J.I.T. Coolidge.
+Rev. Henry A. Hazen.
+Rev. F.H. Hedge.
+Rev. H.A. Parker.
+Rev. Asa Bullard.
+Rev. Alexander McKenzie.
+Rev. J.F. Spaulding.
+Rev. S.K. Lothrop.
+Rev. E. Osborne, S.S.J.E.
+Rev. Leighton Parks.
+Rev. H.W. Foote.
+Rev. Morton Dexter.
+Rev. David H. Brewer.
+Rev. Judson Smith.
+Rev. L.W. Shearman.
+Rev. Charles F. Dole.
+Rev. George M. Boynton.
+Rev. D.W. Waldron.
+Rev. John A. Hamilton.
+Rev. Isaac P. Langworthy.
+Rev. E.K. Alden.
+Rev. E.E. Strong.
+Rev. M.D. Bisbee.
+Rev. Oliver S. Dean.
+Henry Parkman.
+W.H. Sayward.
+Charles A. Cummings.
+Hon. S.C. Cobb.
+Sidney Bartlett.
+John C. Gray.
+Louis Brandeis.
+Hon. George G. Crocker.
+John Bartlett.
+John Fiske.
+J.T.G. Nichols, M.D.
+C.E. Vaughan, M.D.
+John Homans, M.D.
+Chauncey Smith.
+Benj. Vaughan.
+Charles F. Walcott.
+J.B. Warner.
+Walter Dean.
+S.H. Kennard.
+E. Whitney.
+W.P.P. Longfellow.
+H.O. Houghton.
+J.M. Spelman.
+J.C. Dodge.
+E.S. Dixwell.
+L.S. Jones.
+G.W.C. Noble.
+Charles Theodore Russell.
+Clement L. Smith.
+Ezra Farnsworth.
+H.H. Edes.
+Hon. R.R. Bishop.
+H.H. Sprague.
+Charles R. Codman.
+Darwin E. Ware.
+Arthur E. Thayer.
+C.F. Choate.
+Richard H. Dana.
+O.D. Forbes.
+Edward L. Geddings.
+William V. Hutchings.
+John L. Gardner.
+L.M. Sargent.
+H.L. Hallett.
+E.P. Brown.
+W.A. Tower.
+J. Edwards.
+G.H. Campbell.
+Samuel Carr, jr.
+Edward Brooks.
+J. Randolph Coolidge.
+J. Eliot Cabot.
+Fred. Law Olmstead.
+Charles S. Sargent.
+C.A. Richardson.
+Charles F. Shimmin.
+Edward Bangs.
+J.G. Freeman.
+H.H. Coolidge.
+David Hunt.
+Alfred D. Hurd.
+Edward I. Brown.
+W.G. Saltonstall.
+Thomas Weston, jr.
+Richard M. Hodges, M.D.
+Henry J. Bigelow, M.D.
+Charles D. Homans, M.D.
+George H. Lyman, M.D.
+John Dixwell, M.D.
+R.M. Pulsifer.
+Edward L. Beard.
+Solomon Lincoln.
+G.B. Haskell.
+John Boyle O'Reilly.
+Arlo Bates.
+Horace P. Chandler.
+George O. Shattuck.
+Hon. Alex. H. Rice.
+Henry Cabot Lodge.
+Francis Peabody, jr.
+Harcourt Amory.
+F.E. Parker.
+A.S. Wheeler.
+Jacob C. Rogers.
+S.G. Snelling.
+C.H. Barker.
+J.H. Walker.
+Forrest E. Barker.
+John D. Wasbburn.
+Martin Brimmer.
+Fred L. Ames.
+Hon. A.P. Martin.
+
+Mr. DOLPH. If the Senator from Missouri will permit me, those names
+sounded very much like the names of men.
+
+Mr. VEST. They are men's names. I did not say that the petition was
+signed by ladies. I referred to the papers in my hand, which I shall
+proceed to lay before the Senate.
+
+I hold in my hand an argument against woman suffrage by a lady very
+well known in the United States, and well known to the Senators from
+Massachusetts, a lady whose philanthropy, whose exertions in behalf
+of the oppressed and poor and afflicted have given her a national
+reputation. I refer to Mrs. Clara T. Leonard, the wife of a
+distinguished lawyer, and whose words of themselves will command the
+attention of the public.
+
+The Chief Clerk read as follows:
+
+    [Letter from Mrs. Clara T. Leonard.]
+
+    The following letter was read by Thornton K. Lothrop, esq., at
+    the hearing before the Legislative committee on woman suffrage,
+    January 29, 1884:
+
+    The principal reasons assigned for giving suffrage to women are
+    these:
+
+    That the right to vote is a natural and inherent right of which
+    women are deprived by the tyranny of men.
+
+    That the fact that the majority of women do not wish for the right
+    or privilege to vote is not a reason for depriving the minority of
+    an inborn right.
+
+    That women are taxed but not represented, contrary to the
+    principles of free government.
+
+    That society would gain by the participation of women in
+    government, because women are purer and more conscientious than
+    men, and especially that the cause of temperance would be promoted
+    by women's votes.
+
+    Those women who are averse to female suffrage hold differing
+    opinions on all these points, and are entitled to be heard
+    fairly and without unjust reproach and contempt on the part of
+    "suffragists," so called.
+
+    The right to vote is not an inherent right, but, like the right to
+    hold land, is conferred upon individuals by general consent, with
+    certain limitations, and for the general good of all.
+
+    It is as true to say that the earth was made for all its
+    inhabitants, and that human has a right to appropriate a portion
+    of its surface, as to say that all persons have a right to
+    participate in government. Many persons can be found to hold both
+    these opinions. Experience has proved that the general good is
+    promoted by ownership of the soil, with the resultant inducement
+    to its improvement.
+
+    Voting is simply a mathematical test of strength. Uncivilized
+    nations strive for mastery by physical combat, thus wasting life
+    and resources. Enlightened societies agree to determine the
+    relative strength of opposing parties by actual count. God has
+    made women weaker than men, incapable of taking part in battles,
+    indisposed to make riot and political disturbance.
+
+    The vote which, in the hand of a man, is a "possible bayonet,"
+    would not, when thrown by a woman, represent any physical power to
+    enforce her will. If all the women in the State voted in one way,
+    and all the men in the opposite one, the women, even if in the
+    majority, would not carry the day, because the vote would not be
+    an estimate of material strength and the power to enforce the
+    will of the majority. When one considers the strong passions and
+    conflicts excited in elections, it is vain to suppose that the
+    really stronger would yield to the weaker party.
+
+    It is no more unjust to deprive women of the ballot than to
+    deprive minors, who outnumber those above the age of majority, and
+    who might well claim, many of them, to be as well able to decide
+    political questions as their elders.
+
+    If the majority of women are either not desirous to vote or are
+    strongly opposed to voting, the minority should yield in this, as
+    they are obliged to do in all other public matters. In fact, they
+    will be obliged to yield, so long as the present state of opinion
+    exists among women in general, for legislators will naturally
+    consult the wishes of the women of their own families and
+    neighborhood, and be governed by them. There can be no doubt that
+    in this State, where women are highly respected and have great
+    influence, the ballot would be readily granted to them by men, if
+    they desired it, or generally approved of woman suffrage. Women
+    are taxed, it is true; so are minors, without the ballot; it is
+    untrue, to say that either class is not represented. The thousand
+    ties of relationship and friendship cause the identity of interest
+    between the sexes. What is good in a community for men, is good
+    also for their wives and sisters, daughters and friends. The laws
+    of Massachusetts discriminate much in favor of women, by exempting
+    unmarried women of small estate from taxation; by allowing women,
+    and not men, to acquire a settlement without paying a tax; by
+    compelling husbands to support their wives, but exempting the
+    wife, even when rich, from supporting an indigent husband; by
+    making men liable for debts of wives, and not _vice versa_. In the
+    days of the American Revolution, the first cause of complaint was,
+    that a whole people were taxed but not represented.
+
+    To-day there is not a single interest of woman which is not
+    shared and defended by men, not a subject in which she takes an
+    intelligent interest in which she cannot exert an influence in the
+    community proportional to her character and ability. It is because
+    the men who govern live not in a remote country, with separate
+    interests, but in the closest relations of family and
+    neighborhood, and bound by the tenderest ties to the other sex,
+    who are fully and well represented by relations, friends, and
+    neighbors in every locality. That women are purer and more
+    conscientious than men, as a sex, is exceedingly doubtful when
+    applied to politics. The faults of the sexes are different,
+    according to their constitution and habits of life. Men are more
+    violent and open in their misdeeds, but any person who knows human
+    nature well and has examined it in its various phases knows that
+    each sex is open to its peculiar temptation and sin; that the
+    human heart is weak and prone to evil without distinction of sex.
+
+    It seems certain that, were women admitted to vote and to hold
+    political office, all the intrigue, corruption, and selfishness
+    displayed by men in political life would also be found among
+    women. In the temperance cause we should gain little or nothing by
+    admitting women to vote, for two reasons: first, that experience
+    has proved that the strictest laws can not be enforced if a great
+    number of people determine to drink liquor; secondly, because
+    among women voters we should find in our cities thousands of
+    foreign birth who habitually drink beer and spirits daily without
+    intoxication, and who regard license or prohibitory laws as an
+    infringement of their liberty. It has been said that municipal
+    suffrage for women in England has proved a political success. Even
+    if this is true, it offers no parallel to the condition of things
+    in our own cities. First, because there is in England a property
+    qualification required to vote, which excludes the more ignorant
+    and irresponsible classes, and makes women voters few and
+    generally intelligent; secondly, because England is an old,
+    conservative country, with much emigration and but little
+    immigration.
+
+    Here is a constant influx of foreigners: illiterate, without love
+    of our country or interest in, or knowledge of, the history of our
+    liberties, to whom, after a short residence, we give a full share
+    in our government. The result begins to be alarming--enormous
+    taxation, purchasable votes, demagogism,--all these alarm the
+    more thoughtful, and we are not yet sure of the end. It is a wise
+    thought that the possible bayonet or ruder weapon in the hands
+    of our new citizens would be even worse than the ballot, and our
+    safer course is to give the immigrants a stake and interest in
+    the government. But when we learn that on an average one thousand
+    immigrants per week landed at the port of Boston in the past
+    calendar year, is it not well to consider carefully how we double,
+    and more than double, the popular vote, with all its dangers and
+    its ingredients of ignorance and irresponsibility. Last of all, it
+    must be considered that the lives of men and women are essentially
+    different.
+
+    One sex lives in public, in constant conflict with the world; the
+    other sex must live chiefly in private and domestic life, or
+    the race will be without homes and gradually die out. If nearly
+    one-half of the male voters of our State forego their duty or
+    privilege, as is the fact, what proportion of women would exercise
+    the suffrage? Probably a very small one. The heaviest vote would
+    be in the cities, as now, and the ignorant and unfit women would
+    be the ready prey of the unscrupulous demagogue. Women do not hold
+    a position inferior to men. In this land they have the softer
+    side of life--the best of everything. There are, of course,
+    exceptions--individuals--whose struggle in life is hard, whose
+    husbands and fathers are tyrants instead of protectors; so there
+    are bad wives, and men ruined and disheartened by selfish, idle
+    women.
+
+    The best work that a woman can do for the purifying of politics is
+    by her influence over men, by the wise training of her children,
+    by her intelligent, unselfish counsel to husband, brother, or
+    friend, by a thorough knowledge and discussion of the needs of her
+    community. Many laws on the statute-books of our own and other
+    States have been the work of women. More might be added.
+
+    It is the opinion of many of us that woman's power is greater
+    without the ballot or possibility of office-holding for gain. When
+    standing outside of politics she discusses great questions upon
+    their merit. Much has been achieved by women in the anti-slavery
+    cause, the temperance cause, the improvement of public and private
+    charities, the reformation of criminals, all by intelligent
+    discussion and influence upon men. Our legislators have been ready
+    to listen to women and carry out their plans when well framed.
+
+    Women can do much useful public service upon boards of education,
+    school committees, and public charities, and are beginning to
+    do such work. It is of vital importance to the integrity of our
+    charitable and educational administration that it be kept out of
+    politics. Is it not well that we should have one sex who have no
+    political ends to serve who can fill responsible positions of
+    public trust? Voting alone can easily be exercised by women
+    without rude contact, but to attain any political power women must
+    affiliate themselves with men; because women will differ on
+    public questions, must attend primary meetings and caucuses, will
+    inevitably hold public office and strive for it; in short, women
+    must enter the political arena. This result will be repulsive to a
+    large portion of the sex, and would tend to make women unfeminine
+    and combative, which would be a detriment to society.
+
+    It is well that men after the burden and heat of the day should
+    return to homes where the quiet side of life is presented to them.
+    In these peaceful New England homes of ours, great and noble men
+    have been raised by wise and pious mothers, who instructed them,
+    not in politics, but in those general principles of justice,
+    integrity, and unselfishness which belong to and will insure
+    statesmanship in the men who are true to them. Here is the
+    stronghold of the sex, weakest in body, powerful for good or evil
+    over the stronger one, whom women sway and govern, not by the
+    ballot and by greater numbers but by those gentle influences
+    designed by the Creator to soften and subdue man's ruder nature.
+
+    CLARA T. LEONARD.
+
+Mr. HOAR. The Senator from Missouri has alluded to me in connection
+with the name of this lady. Perhaps he will allow me to make an
+additional statement to that which I furnished him, in order that the
+statement about her may be complete.
+
+All that the Senator from Missouri has said of the character and worth
+of Mrs. Leonard is true. I do not know her personally. Her husband is
+my respected personal friend, a lawyer of high standing and character.
+All that the Senator has said of her ability is proved better than by
+any other testimony, by the very able and powerful letter which has
+just been read. But Mrs. Leonard herself is the strongest refutation
+of her own argument.
+
+Politics, the political arena, political influence, political action
+in this country consists, I suppose, in two things: one of them the
+being intrusted with the administration of public affairs, and second,
+having the vote counted in determining who shall be public servants,
+and what public measures shall prevail in the commonwealth. Now, this
+lady was intrusted for years with one of the most important public
+functions ever exercised by any human being in the commonwealth
+of Massachusetts. We have a board, called the board of lunacy and
+charity, which controls the large charities for which Massachusetts
+is famous and in many of which she was the first among civilized
+communities, for the care of the pauper and the insane and the
+criminal woman, and the friendless and the poor child. It is one
+of the most important things, except the education of youth, which
+Massachusetts does.
+
+A little while ago a political campaign in Massachusetts turned upon a
+charge which her governor made against the people of the commonwealth
+in regard to the conduct of the great hospital at Tewksbury, where
+she was charged by her chief executive magistrate with making sale of
+human bodies, with cruelty to the poor and defenseless; and not only
+the whole country, but especially the whole people of Massachusetts,
+were stirred to the very depths of their souls by that accusation.
+Mrs. Clara T. Leonard, the writer of this letter, came forward and
+informed the people that she had been one of the board who had managed
+that institution for years, that she knew all about it through and
+through, that the accusation was false and a slander; and before her
+word and her character the charge of that distinguished governor went
+down and sunk into merited obscurity and ignominy.
+
+Now, the question is whether the lady who can be intrusted with the
+charge of one of the most important departments of government, and
+whose judgment in regard to its character or proper administration is
+to be taken as gospel by the people where her reputation extends, is
+not fit to be trusted to have her vote counted when the question
+is who is to be the next person who is to be trusted with that
+administration. Mrs. Leonard's mistake is not in misunderstanding the
+nature either of woman or of man, which she understands perfectly; it
+is in misunderstanding the nature of politics, that is, the political
+arena; and this lady has been in the political arena for the last
+ten years of her life, one of the most important and potent forces
+therein.
+
+It is true, as she says, that the wife and the mother educate the
+child and the man, and when the great function of the state, as we
+hold in our State and as is fast being held everywhere, is also the
+education of the child and the man, how does it degrade that wife and
+mother, whose important function it is to do this thing, to utter
+her voice and have her vote counted in regard to the methods and the
+policies by which that education shall be conducted?
+
+Why, Mr. President, Mrs. Leonard says in that letter that woman, the
+wife and the maiden and the daughter, has no political ends to serve.
+If political ends be to desire office for the greed of gain, if
+political ends be to get an unjust power over other men, if political
+ends be to get political office by bribery or by mob violence or by
+voting through the shutter of a beer-house, that is true: but the
+persons who are in favor of this measure believe that those very
+things that Mrs. Leonard holds up as the proper ends in the life of
+women are political ends and nothing else; that the education of the
+child, that the preservation of the purity of the home, that the care
+for the insane and the idiot and the blind and the deaf and the ruined
+and deserted, are not only political ends but are the chief political
+ends for which this political body, the state, is created: and those
+who desire the help of women in the administration of the state desire
+it because of the ability which could write such a letter as that on
+the wrong side, and because the qualities of heart and brain which God
+has given to understand this class of political ends better than He
+has given it to the masculine heart and brain are needed for their
+administration.
+
+I have no word of disrespect for Mrs. Leonard, but I say that, in
+spite of herself and her letter, her life and her character are the
+most abundant and ample refutation of the belief which she erroneously
+thinks she entertains. Nobody invites these ladies to a contest of
+bayonets; nobody who believes that government is a matter of mere
+physical force asks the co-operation of woman in its administration.
+It is because government is a conflict of such arguments as that
+letter states on the one side, because the object of government is the
+object to which this lady's own life is devoted, that the friends of
+woman suffrage and of this amendment ask that it shall be adopted.
+
+Mr. VEST. Mr. President, my great personal respect for the Senator
+from Massachusetts has given me an interval of enforced silence, and I
+have only to say that if I should print my desultory remarks I should
+be compelled to omit his interruption for fear that the amendment
+would be larger than the original bill. [Laughter.]
+
+I fail to see that anything which has fallen from the distinguished
+Senator has convicted Mrs. Clara Leonard of inconsistency or has added
+anything to the argument upon his side of the question. I have
+never said or intimated that there were women who were not credible
+witnesses. I have never thought or intimated that there were not women
+who were competent to administer the affairs of State or even to lead
+armies. There have been such women, and I believe there will be to the
+end of time, as there have been effeminate men who have been better
+adapted to the distaff and the spindle than to the sword or to
+statesmanship. But these are exceptions in either sex.
+
+If this lady have, as she unquestionably has, the strength of
+intellect conceded to her by the Senator from Massachusetts and
+evidenced by her own production, her judgment of woman is worth that
+of a continent of men. The best judge of any woman is a woman. The
+poorest judge of any woman is a man. Let any woman with defect or flaw
+go amongst a community of men and she will be a successful impostor.
+Let her go amongst a community of women and in one instant the
+instinct, the atmosphere circumambient, will tell her story.
+
+Mrs. Leonard gives us the result of her opinion and of her experience
+as to whether this right of suffrage should be conferred upon her
+own sex. The Senator from Massachusetts speaks of her evidence in a
+political campaign in Massachusetts and that her unaided and single
+evidence crushed down the governor of that great State. I thank the
+Senator for that statement. If Mrs. Leonard had been an office-holder
+and a voter not a single township would have believed the truth of
+what she uttered.
+
+Mr. HOAR. She was an office-holder, and the governor tried to put her
+out.
+
+Mr. VEST. Ah! but what sort of an office-holder? She held the office
+delegated to her by God himself, a ministering angel to the sick, the
+afflicted, and the insane. What man in his senses would take from
+woman this sphere? What man would close to her the charitable
+institutions and eleemosynary establishments of the country? That is
+part of her kingdom; that is part of her undisputed sway and realm. Is
+that the office to which woman suffragists of this country ask us now
+to admit them? Is it to be the director of a hospital? Is it to the
+presidency of a board of visitors of an eleemosynary institution? Oh,
+no; they want to be Presidents, to be Senators, and Members of the
+House of Representatives, and, God save the mark, ministerial and
+executive officers, sheriffs, constables, and marshals.
+
+Of course, this lady is found in this board of directors. Where else
+should a true woman be found? Where else has she always been found but
+by the fevered brow, the palsied hand, the erring intellect, ay, God
+bless them, from the cradle to the grave the guide and support of the
+faltering steps of childhood and the weakening steps of old age!
+
+Oh, no, Mr. President; this will not do. If we are to tear down all
+the blessed traditions, if we are to desolate our homes and firesides,
+if we are to unsex our mothers and wives and sisters and turn our
+blessed temples of domestic peace into ward political-assembly rooms,
+pass this joint resolution. But for one I thank God that I am so
+old-fashioned that I would not give one memory of my grandmother or my
+mother for all the arguments that could be piled, Pelion upon Ossa, in
+favor of this political monstrosity.
+
+I now propose to read from a pamphlet sent to me by a lady whom I
+am not able to characterize as a resident of any State, although I
+believe she resides in the State of Maine. I do not know whether she
+be wife or mother. She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D.T. Whitney. I
+have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual
+women. I say to-day it ought to be in every household in this broad
+land. It ought to be the domestic gospel of every true, gentle,
+loving, virtuous woman upon all this continent. There is not one line
+or syllable in it that is not written in letters of gold. I shall not
+read it, for my strength does not suffice, nor will the patience of
+the Senate permit, but from beginning to end it breathes the womanly
+sentiment which has made pure and great men and gentle and loving
+women.
+
+I will venture to say, in my great admiration and respect for this
+woman, whether she be married or single, she ought to be a wife, and
+ought to be a mother. Such a woman could only have brave and wise men
+for sons and pure and virtuous women for daughters. Here is her advice
+to her sex. I am only sorry that every word of it could not be read in
+the Senate, but I have trespassed too long.
+
+Mr. COCKRELL. Let it be printed in your remarks.
+
+Mr. VEST. I shall ask that it be printed. I will undertake, however,
+to read only a few sentences, not of exceptional superiority to the
+rest, because every sentence is equal to every other. There is not one
+impure unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of
+it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of
+the society and politics of the United States for this production.
+
+After all--
+
+She says to her own sex--
+
+    After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it
+    would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such
+    existence as they could arrange without us.
+
+Oh, how true that is; how true!
+
+In blessed homes, or in scattered dissipations of show, amusement, or
+the worse which these shows and amusements are but terribly akin to,
+women give purpose to and direct the results of all men's work. If
+the false standards of living first urge them, until at length the
+horrible intoxication of the game itself drives them on further and
+deeper, are we less responsible for the last state of those men than
+for the first?
+
+Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a simpler
+and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would take them
+anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more unmitigated evil? Ah,
+there come both answer and errand again. Raise the fallen--at
+least, save the growing womanhood--stop the destruction that rushes
+accelerating on, before you challenge new difficulty and danger with
+an indiscriminate franchise. Are not these bad women the very "plenty"
+that would out-balance you at the polls if you persist in trying the
+"patch-and-plaster" remedy of suffrage and legislation.
+
+Recognize the fact, the law, that your power, your high commission, is
+inward, vital, formative and causal. Bring all questions of choice
+or duty to this test; will it work at the heart of things, among the
+realities and forces? Try your own life by this; remember that mere
+external is falsehood and death. The letter killeth. Give up all that
+is only of the appearance, or even chiefly so, in conscious
+delight and motive--in person, surrounding, pursuit. Let your
+self-presentation, your home-making and adorning, your social effort
+and interest, your occupation and use of talent, all shape and issue
+for the things that are essentially and integrally good, and that the
+world needs to have prevail. Until you can do this, and induce such
+doing, it is of little use to clamor for mere outward right or to
+contend that it would be rightly applied.
+
+This whole pamphlet is a magnificent illustration of that stupendous
+and vital truth that the mission and sphere of woman is in the inward
+life of man; that she must be the building up and governing power that
+comes from those better impulses, those inward secrets of the heart
+and sentiment that govern men to do all that is good and pure and holy
+and keep them from all that is evil.
+
+Mr. President, the emotions of women govern. What would be the result
+of woman suffrage if applied to the large cities of this country is a
+matter of speculation. What women have done in times of turbulence and
+excitement in large cities in the past we know. Open that terrible
+page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click
+of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris
+demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be
+driven by political passion. Who led those blood-thirsty mobs? Who
+shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman. Her picture upon
+the pages of history to-day is indelible. In the city of Paris in
+those ferocious mobs the controlling agency, nay, not agency, but the
+controlling and principal power, came from those whom God has intended
+to be the soft and gentle angels of mercy throughout the world. But I
+have said more than I intended. I ask that this pamphlet be printed in
+my remarks.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. If there be no objection, the pamphlet will be
+printed in the RECORD as requested by the Senator from Missouri. The
+Chair hears no objection.
+
+The pamphlet is as follows:
+
+    THE LAW OF WOMAN-LIFE.
+
+    The external arguments on both sides the modern woman question
+    have been pretty thoroughly presented and well argued. It seems
+    needless to repeat or recombine them; but in one relation they
+    have scarcely been handled with any direct purpose. Justice and
+    expediency have been the points insisted on or contested; these
+    have not gone back far enough; they have not touched the central
+    fact, to set it forth in its force and finality. The fact is
+    original and inherent, behind and at the root of the entire
+    matter, with all its complication and circumstance. We have to ask
+    a question to which it is the answer, and whose answer is that of
+    the whole doubt and dispute.
+
+    What is the law of woman-life?
+
+    What was she made woman for, and not man?
+
+    Shall we look back to that old third chapter of Genesis?
+
+    When mankind had taken the knowledge and power of good and evil
+    into their own hands through the mere earthly wisdom of the
+    serpent; when the woman had had her hasty outside way and lead,
+    according to the story, and woe had come of it, what was the
+    sentence? And was it a penance, or a setting right, or a promise,
+    or all three?
+
+    The serpent was first dealt with. The narrow policy, the keen
+    cunning, the little, immediate outlook, the expedient motive; all
+    that was impersonated of temporary shift and outward prudence
+    in mortal affairs, regardless of, or blind to, the everlasting
+    issues; all, in short, that represented material and temporal
+    interest as a rule and order--and is not man's external
+    administration upon the earth largely forced to be a legislation
+    upon these principles and economies?--was disposed of with the few
+    words, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman."
+
+    Was this punishment--as reflected upon the woman--or the power of
+    a grand retrieval for her? Not to man, who had been led, and who
+    would be led again, by the woman, was the commission of holy
+    revenge intrusted; but henceforth, "I will set the woman against
+    thee." Against the very principle and live prompting of evil, or
+    of mere earthly purpose and motive. "Between thy seed and her
+    seed." Your struggle with her shall be in and for the very life of
+    the race. "It," her life brought forth, "shall bruise thy head,"
+    thy whole power, and plan, and insidious cunning; "and thou shall
+    bruise," shalt sting, torment, hinder, and trouble in the way
+    and daily going, "his heel," his footstep. Thou, the subtle and
+    creeping thing of the ground, shalt lurk after and threaten with
+    crookedness and poison the ways of the men-children in their
+    earth-toiling; the woman, the mother, shall turn upon thee for and
+    in them and shall beat thee down!
+
+    Unto the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and
+    thy conception." The burden and the glory are set in one. The
+    pain of the world shall be in your heart; the trouble, the
+    contradiction of it, shall be against your love and insight. But
+    your pain shall be your power; you shall be the life-bearer;
+    you shall hold the motive; yours shall be the desire, and your
+    husband's the dominion. Therefore shall you bring your aspiration
+    to him, that he may fulfill it for you. "Your desire shall be unto
+    him, and he shall rule."
+
+    And unto Adam He said, "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice
+    of thy wife"--yes, and because thou wilt hearken--"thy sorrow
+    shall be in the labor of the earth; the ground shall be cursed;"
+    in all material things shall be cross and trouble, not against
+    you, but "for your sake." "In your sorrow you shall eat of it
+    all the days of your life." Your need and struggle shall be with
+    external things, and with the ruling of them. "For your sake,"
+    that you may learn your mastery, inherit your true power, carry
+    out with ease and understanding the desire and need of the race,
+    which woman represents, discerns afar, and pleads to you.
+
+    And Adam bowed before the Lord's judgment; we are not told that he
+    answered anything to that; but he turned to his wife, and in that
+    moment "called her name Eve, because she was the mother of all
+    living." Then and there was the division made; and to which, can
+    we say, was the empire given? Both were set in conditions, hemmed
+    in to divine and special work: man, by the stress and sorrow of
+    the ground; woman, by the stress and sorrow of her maternity, and
+    of her spiritual conception, making her truly the "mother of all
+    the living."
+
+    At the beginning of human history, or tradition, then, we get
+    the answer to our question: the law of woman-life is central,
+    interior, and from the heart of things; the law of the man's life
+    is circumferential, enfolding, shaping, bearing on and around,
+    outwardly; wheel within wheel is the constitution of human power.
+    It will be an evil day for the world when the nave shall leave its
+    place and contend for that of the felloe. Iron-rimmed for its busy
+    revolution and outward contact is the life and strength of man;
+    but the tempered steel is at the heart and within the soul of the
+    woman, that she may bear the silent pressure of the axle, and
+    quietly and invisibly originate and support the entire onward
+    movement. "The spirit of the living creature is in the wheels,"
+    and they can move no otherwise. "When the living creatures went,
+    the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted
+    up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up." That was what
+    Ezekiel saw in his vision.
+
+    There can he no going forward without a life and presence and
+    impulse at the center; and in the organization of humanity there
+    is where the place and power of woman have been put. For good or
+    for evil, for the serpent or for the redeeming Christ, she must
+    move, must influence, must achieve beforehand, and at the heart;
+    she must be the mother of the race; she must be the mother of the
+    Messiah. Not woman in her own person, but "one born of woman," is
+    the Saviour. For everything that is formed of the Creator, from
+    the unorganized stone to the thought of righteousness in the heart
+    of the race, there must be a matrix; in the creation and in the
+    recreation of His human child God makes woman and the soul of
+    woman His blessed organ and instrument. When woman clears herself
+    of her own perversions, her self-imposed limitations, returns to
+    her spiritual power and place, and cries, "Behold the handmaid of
+    the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word," then shall the
+    spirit descend unto her; then shall come the redemption.
+
+    Take this for the starting-point; it is the key.
+
+    Within, behind, antecedent to all result in action, are the
+    place and office of the woman--by the law of woman-life. And all
+    question of her deed and duty should be brought to this test. Is
+    it of her own, interior, natural relation, putting her at her true
+    advantage, harmonious with the key to which her life is set? I
+    think this suffrage question must settle itself precisely upon
+    this ground-principle, and that all argument should range
+    conclusively around it. Judging so, we should find, I think, that
+    not at the polls, where the last utterance of a people's voice
+    is given--where the results of character, and conscience, and
+    intelligence are shown--is her best and rightful work: on the
+    contrary, that it is useless here, unless first done elsewhere.
+    But where little children learn to think and speak--where men love
+    and listen, and the word is forming--is the office she has to
+    fill, the errand she has to do. The question is, can she do both?
+    Is there need that she should do both? Does not the former and
+    greater include the latter and less?
+
+    Hers are indeed the primary meetings: in her nursery, her home,
+    and social circles; with other women, with young men, upon whose
+    tone and character in her maturity her womanhood and motherhood
+    join their beautiful and mighty influence; above all, among young
+    girls--the "little women," to whom the ensign and commission are
+    descending--is her undisputed power. Purify politics? Purify the
+    sewers? But what if, first, the springs, and reservoirs, and
+    conduits could be watched, guarded, filtered, and then the using
+    be made clean and careful all through the homes; a better system
+    devised and carried out for separating, neutralizing, destroying
+    hurtful refuse? Then the poisonous gases might not be creeping
+    back upon us through our enforced economies, our makeshifts and
+    stop-gaps of outside legislation. For legislation is, after all,
+    but cut-off, curb, and patch; an external, troublesome, partial,
+    uncertain application of hindrance and remedy. What physician will
+    work with lotion and plaster when he can touch, and control, and
+    heal at the very seat of the disease?
+
+    It is the beginning of the fulfillment that women have waked to
+    the consciousness that they have not as yet filled their full
+    place in human life and affairs. Only has not the mistake been
+    made of contending with and grappling results, when causes were in
+    their hands? Have they not let go the mainsprings to run after
+    and effectually push with pins the refractory cogs upon the
+    wheel-rims?
+
+    Woman always deserts herself when she puts her life and motive
+    and influence in mere outsides. Outsides of fashion and place,
+    outsides of charm and apparel, outsides of work and ambition--she
+    must learn that these are not her true showing; she must go hack
+    and put herself where God has called her to be with Himself, at
+    the silent, holy inmost; then we shall feel, if not at once, yet
+    surely soon or some time, a new order beginning. He, the Father
+    of all, gives it to us to be the motherhood. That is the great
+    solving and upraising word; not limited to mere parentage, but the
+    law of woman-life. For good or for evil she mothers the world.
+
+    Not all are called to motherhood in the literal sense, but all
+    are called to the great, true motherhood in some of its manifold
+    trusts and obligations. "_Noblesse oblige_;" you can not lay it
+    down. "More are the children of the desolate than of her who hath
+    a husband." All the little children that are born must look to
+    womanhood somewhere for mothering. Do they all get it? All the
+    works and policies of men look back somewhere for a true "desire"
+    toward and by which only they can rule. Is the desire of the
+    woman--of the home, the mother-motive of the world and human
+    living--kept in the integrity and beauty for which it was
+    intrusted to her, that it might move the power of man to noble
+    ends?
+
+    Do you ask the governing of the nation? You have the making of
+    the nation. Would you choose your statesmen? First make your
+    statesmen.
+
+    Indeed the whole cause on trial may be summarily ended by the
+    proving of an alibi, an elsewhere of demand. Is woman needed at
+    the caucuses, conventions, polls? She is needed, at the same time,
+    elsewhere. Two years of time and strength, of thought and love,
+    from some woman, are essential for every little human being, that
+    he may even begin a life. When you remember that every man is once
+    a little child, born of a woman, trained--or needing training--at
+    a woman's hands; that of the little men, every one of whom takes
+    and shapes his life so, come at length the hand for the helm, the
+    voice for the law, and the arm to enforce law--what do you want
+    more for a woman's opportunity and control?
+
+    Which would you choose as a force, an advantage, in settling
+    any question of public moment, or as touching your own private
+    interest through the general management--the right to go upon
+    election day and cast one vote, or a hold beforehand upon the
+    individual ear and attention of each voter now qualified? The
+    ability to present to him your argument, to show him the real
+    point at issue, to convince and persuade him of the right and
+    lasting, instead of the weak and briefly politic way? This initial
+    privilege is in the hands of woman; assuming that she can be
+    brought to feel and act as a unit, which appears to be what is
+    claimed for her in the argument for her regeneration of the outer
+    political word.
+
+    But already and separately, if every intelligent, conscientious
+    woman can but reach one man, and influence him from the principle
+    involved--from her interior perception of it, kept pure on purpose
+    from bias and temptation that assail him in the outside mix and
+    jostle--will she not have done her work without the casting of a
+    ballot? And what becomes of "taxation without representation,"
+    when, from Eden down, Eve can always plead with Adam, can have the
+    first word instead of the last--if she knows what that first word
+    is, in herself and thence in its power with him--can beguile him
+    to his good instead of to his harm, as indeed she only meant to do
+    in that first ignorant experiment? Would it be any less easy to
+    qualify for and accomplish this than to convince and outnumber in
+    public gathering not only bodies of men but the mass of women that
+    will also have to be confronted and convinced or overborne?
+
+    Preconceived opinions, minds made up, men not so easily beguiled
+    to the pure good, you say? Woman quite as apt to make mistakes out
+    of Paradise as in? That only returns us to the primal need and
+    opportunity. Get the man to listen to you before his mind is made
+    up--before his manhood is made up; while it is in the making. That
+    is just the power and place that belong to you, and you must seize
+    and fill. It is your natural right; God gave it to you. "The seed
+    of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head."
+
+    We can not do all in one day, and in such a day of the world as
+    this. We plant trees for posterity where forests have been laid
+    waste and the beautiful work of life is to be done over again; we
+    can not expect to see our fruit in souls and in the nation at less
+    cost of faith and time. Take care, then, of the little children:
+    the men children, to make men of them; the women children--oh,
+    yes, even above all--to make ready for future mothering--to snatch
+    from the evil that works over against pure womanliness. Until you
+    have done this let men fend for themselves in rough outsides a
+    little longer; except, perhaps, as wise, able women whom the
+    trying transition time calls forth may find fit way and place for
+    effort and protest--there is always room for that, and noble work
+    has been and is being done; but do not rear a new generation of
+    women to expect and desire charges and responsibilities reversive
+    of their own life-law, through whose perfect fulfillment alone may
+    the future clean place be made for all to work in.
+
+    Is there excess of female population? Can not all expect the
+    direct rule of a home? Is not this exactly, perhaps, just now,
+    for the more universal remedial mothering that in this age is the
+    thing immediately needed? Let her who has no child seek where she
+    can help the burdened mother of many; how she can best reach with
+    influence, and wisdom, and cherishing, the greatest number--or
+    most efficiently a few--of these dear, helpless, terrible little
+    souls, who are to make, in a few years, a new social condition; a
+    better and higher, happier and safer, or a lower, worse, bitterer,
+    more desperately complicated and distressful one.
+
+    "Desire earnestly the best gifts," said Saint Paul, after
+    enumerating the gifts of teaching and prophecy and authority; "and
+    I show you," he goes on, "a yet more excellent way." Charity--not
+    mere alms, or toleration, or general benignity, out of a safe
+    self-provision; but _caritas_--nearness, and caring, and
+    loving,--the very essence of mothering; the way to and hold of
+    the heart of it all, the heart of the life of humanity. "Keep thy
+    heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."
+    That is the first word; it charges womanhood itself, which must be
+    set utterly right before it can take hold to right the world. Here
+    are at once task and mission and rewarding sway.
+
+    Woman has got off the track; she must see that first, and replace
+    herself. We are mothering the world still; but we are mothering
+    it, in a fearfully wide measure, all wrong.
+
+    Sacrifice is the beginning of all redemption. We must give up. We
+    must even give up the wish and seeming to have a hand in things,
+    that we may work unseen in the elements, and make them fit and
+    healthful; that daily bread and daily life may be sweet again
+    in dear, old, homely ways, and plentiful with all truly blessed
+    opportunities. We are not to organize the world, or to conquer it,
+    or to queen it. We are just to take it again and mother it. If
+    woman would begin that, search out the cradles--of life and
+    character--and take care of the whole world of fifty years hence
+    in taking care of them, calling upon men and the state, when
+    needful, to authorize her action and furnish outward means for
+    it--I wonder what might come, as earnest of good, even in this our
+    day, in which we know not our visitation?
+
+    And here again come allowance and exception for what women can
+    always do when this world-mothering forces an appeal to the
+    strength and authority of man. Women have never been prevented
+    from doing their real errands in the world, even outside the
+    domestic boundary. They have defended their husbands' castles in
+    the old chivalrous times, when the male chivalry was away at the
+    crusades. They have headed armies when Heaven called them; only
+    Heaven never called all the women at once; but when the king was
+    crowned, the mission done, they have turned back with desire to
+    their sheltered, gentle, unobtrusive life again. There has no
+    business to be a standing army of women; not even a standing
+    political army. Women have navigated and brought home ships when
+    commanders have died or been stricken helpless upon the ocean;
+    they have done true, intelligent, patient work for science, art,
+    religion; and those have done the most who have never stopped to
+    contend first, whether a woman, as such, may do it or not.
+
+    Look at what Dorothea Dix has done, single-handed, single-mouthed,
+    in asylums and before legislatures. Women have sat on thrones, and
+    governed kingdoms well, when that was the station in life to which
+    God called them. If Victoria of England has been anything, she has
+    been the mother of her land; she has been queen and protecting
+    genius of its womanhood and homes. And when a woman does these
+    things, as called of God--not talks of them, as to whether she may
+    make claim to do them--she carries a weight from the very sanctity
+    out of which she steps, as woman, that moves men unlike the moving
+    of any other power. Shall she resign the chance of doing really
+    great things, of meeting grand crises, by making herself common in
+    ward-rooms and at street-corners, and abolishing the perfect idea
+    of home by no longer consecrating herself to it?
+
+    If individual woman, as has been said, may gain and influence
+    individual man, and so the man-power in affairs--a body of women,
+    purely as such, with cause, and plea, and reason, can always have
+    the ear and attention of bodies of men; but to do this they must
+    come straight from their home sanctities, as representing them--as
+    able to represent them otherwise than men, because of their
+    hearth-priestesshood; not as politicians, bred and hardened in the
+    public arenas.
+
+    That the family is the heart of the state, and that the state
+    is but the widened family, is the fact which the old vestal
+    consecration, power, and honor set forth and kept in mind.
+
+    The voice which has of late been so generally conceded to women in
+    town, decisions as regarding public schools, is an instance of the
+    fittingness of relegating to them certain interests of which they
+    should know more than men, because--applying the key-test with
+    which we have started--it has direct relation to and springs from
+    their motherhood. But can one help suggesting that if the movement
+    had been to place women, merely and directly, upon the committees,
+    by votes of men who saw that this work might be in great part best
+    done by them; if women had asked and offered for the place without
+    the jostle of the town-meeting, or putting in that wedge for
+    the ballot--the thing might have been as readily done, and the
+    objection, or political precedent, avoided.
+
+    It is not the real opportunity, when that arises or shows itself
+    in the line of her life-law, that is to be refused for woman. It
+    is the taking from internal power to add to external complication
+    of machinery and to the friction of strife. Let us just touch
+    upon some of the current arguments concerning these external
+    impositions which one set is demanding and the other entreating
+    against.
+
+    If voting is to be the chief power in woman's hands, or even a
+    power of half the moment that is contended for it, it will grow to
+    be the motive and end, the all-absorbing object, with women that
+    it is with men.
+
+    The gubernatorial canvass, the presidential year, these will
+    interrupt and clog all home business, suspend decisions, paralyze
+    plans, as they do with men, or else we shall not be much, as
+    thorough politicians, after all. And if we talk of mending all
+    that, of putting politics in their right place, and governing
+    by pure principle instead of party trick, and stumping and
+    electioneering, we go back in effect to the acknowledgment that
+    only in the interior work, and behind politics, can women do
+    better things at all; which, precisely, was to be demonstrated.
+
+    Think, simply, of election day for women.
+
+    Would it be so invariably easy a thing for a home-keeper to do,
+    at the one opportunity of the year, or the four years, on a
+    particular day, her duty in this matter? It is easy to say that it
+    takes no more time than a hundred other things that some do; but
+    setting apart all the argument that previous time and strength
+    must have been spent in properly qualifying, how many of
+    the hundred other things are done now without interruption,
+    postponement, hindrance, through domestic contingencies? or are
+    there a hundred other things done when the home contingencies are
+    really met by a woman? A woman's life is not like a man's. That
+    a man's life may be--that he may transact his out-door business;
+    keep his hours and appointments; may cast his vote on election
+    day; may represent wife and children in all wherein the community
+    cares for, or might injure him and them--the woman, some woman,
+    must be at the home post, that the home order may go on, from
+    which he derives that command of time, and freedom from hindering
+    necessities, which leave him to his work. And so, as the old
+    proverb says, while man's work is from sun to sun--made definite,
+    a matter to which he can go forth, and from which he can come
+    in--a woman's work, of keeping the place of the forthgoing and
+    incoming, is never done, from the very nature and ceaseless
+    importance of it.
+
+    Must she go to the polls, sick or well, baby or no baby, servant
+    or no servant, strength or no strength, desire or no desire? If
+    she have cook and housemaid they are to go also, and number her
+    two to one, anyway; probably on election day, which they would
+    make a holiday, they would--as at other crises, of birth,
+    sickness, death, house-cleaning, which should occur in no
+    first-class families--come down upon her with their appropriate
+    _coup d'état_, and "leave;" making the State-stroke, in this
+    instance, of scoring three votes, two dropped and one lost, for
+    the irrepressible side.
+
+    How will it be when Norah, and Maggie, and Katie have not only
+    their mass and confession, their Fourth-of-July and Christmas,
+    their mission-weeks, their social engagements and family plans,
+    and their appointments with their dress-makers, to curtail your
+    claims upon their bargained time and service, but their share in
+    the primary meetings and caucuses, committees, and torch-light
+    processions, and mass meetings? For what shall prevent the
+    excitements, the pleasurings, the runnings hither and thither,
+    that men delight in from following in the train of politics and
+    parties with the common woman? Perhaps it may even be discovered,
+    to the still further detriment of our already painfully hampered
+    and perplexed domestic system, that the pursuit of fun, votes,
+    offices, is more remunerative, as well as gentlewomanly--as
+    Micawber might express it--than the cleansing of pots and pans,
+    the weekly wash, or the watching of the roast. Perhaps in that
+    enfranchised day there will be no Katies and Maggies' and the
+    Norahs will know their place no more. Then the enlightened
+    womanhood may have to begin at the foundation and glorify the
+    kitchen again. And good enough for her, in the wide as well as
+    primitive sense of the phrase, and a grand turn in the history
+    that repeats itself toward the old, forgotten, peaceful side of
+    the cycle it may be!
+
+    But the argument does not rest upon any such points as these. It
+    rests upon the inside nature of a woman's work; upon the need
+    there is to begin again to-day at the heart of things and make
+    that right; upon the evident fact that this can be done none too
+    soon or earnestly, if the community and the country are not to
+    keep on in the broad way to a threatened destruction; and upon the
+    certainty that it can never be done unless it is done by woman,
+    and with all of woman's might. Not by struggles for new and
+    different place, but by the better, more loving, more intelligent,
+    deep-seeing, and deep-feeling filling of her own place, that none
+    will dispute and none can take from her. We are not where woman
+    was in the old brutal days that are so often quoted; and we shall
+    not, need not, return to that. Christianity has disposed of that
+    sort of argument. We are on a vantage ground for the doing of our
+    real, essential work better than it has been done ever before in
+    the history of the world; and we are madly leaving our work and
+    our vantage together.
+
+    The great step made by woman was in the generation preceding this
+    one of restlessness--the restlessness that has come through the
+    first feeling of great power. It was made in the time when women
+    learned physiology, that they might rear and nurse their families
+    and help their neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they
+    might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of
+    knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political
+    history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their
+    brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as
+    the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles,
+    that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work
+    with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners. The good work was
+    begun in the schools where girls were first told, as George B.
+    Emerson used to tell us Boston girls, that we were learning
+    everything he could teach us, in order to be women: wives,
+    mothers, friends, social influencers, in the best and largest way
+    possible. Women grew strong and capable under such instruction and
+    motive. Are their daughters and grand-daughters about to leap
+    the fence, leave their own realm little cared for--or doomed to
+    be--undertake the whole scheme of outside creation, or contest
+    it with the men? Then God help the men! God save the Commonwealth!
+
+    We are past the point already where homes are suffering, or liable
+    to suffer, neglect or injury; they are already left unmade. Shall
+    this go on? Between frivolities and ambitions, between social
+    vanities, and shows, and public meddling's and mixings--for where
+    one woman is needed and doing really brave, true work, there are
+    a hundred rushing forth for the mere sake of rushing--is the
+    primitive home, the power of heaven upon earth to slip away from
+    among us? Let us not build outsides which have no insides, let us
+    not put a face upon things which has no reality behind it. Beware
+    lest we make the confusion that we need the suffrage to help us
+    unmake; lest we tear to pieces that we may patch again. Crazy
+    patchwork that would be, indeed!
+
+    Are women's votes required because men will not legislate away
+    evils that they do not heartily wish away? Is government
+    corrupted because men desire shield and opportunity for dishonest
+    speculation; authority and countenance for nefarious combinations?
+    The more need to go to work at the beginning rather than to plunge
+    into the pitch and be defiled; more need to make haste and educate
+    a better generation of men, if it be so we can not, except _vi et
+    armis_, influence the generation that is. But do you think that if
+    women are in earnest--enough in earnest to give up, as they seem
+    to be to demand--they might not bring their real power to bear
+    even upon these evil things, in their root and inception, and even
+    now? Suppose women would not live in houses, or wear jewels and
+    gowns, that are bought for them out of wicked millions made upon
+    the stock exchange?
+
+    Suppose they would stop decorating their dwellings to an agony,
+    crowding them hurriedly with this and that of the last and newest,
+    just because it is last and new, making a show and rivalry of
+    what is not a true-grown beauty of a home at all, but a mere
+    meretriciousness; suppose they would so set to work and change
+    society that displays and feastings, which use up at every
+    separate one a year's comfortable support for a quiet, modest
+    family, should be given up as vulgarities; that people should care
+    for, and be ready for, a true interchange of life and thought, and
+    simple, uncrowded opportunities for these; suppose women would
+    say, "No; I will not blaze at Newport, or run through Europe
+    dropping American eagles or English sovereigns after me like the
+    trail of a comet, or the crumbs that Hop-'o-my-thumb let fall from
+    his pocket that the people at home might track the way he had
+    gone; because if I have money, there is better work to be done
+    with it; and I will not have the money that is made by gambling
+    manipulations and cheats."
+
+    Do you think this would have no influence? More than that, and
+    further back, and lowlier down, suppose they should say, every
+    one, "I will not have the new, convenient house, the fresh
+    carpetings, the pretty curtains, or even the least, most fitting
+    freshness, until I know the means are earned for me with honest
+    service to the world, and by no lucky turn of even a small
+    speculation." Further back yet, suppose them to declare, "I will
+    not have the home at all, nor my own happiness, unless it can be
+    based and builded on the kind of life-work that helps to make a
+    real prosperity; that really goes to the building and safe-keeping
+    of a whole nation of such homes." Would there be no power in
+    that? Would it not be a kind of woman-suffrage to settle the very
+    initials of all that ever bears upon the public question? And to
+    bring that sort of woman on the stage, and to the front, is there
+    not enough work to do, and enough "higher education" to insist on
+    and secure?
+
+    After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it
+    would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such
+    existence as they could arrange without us. In blessed homes, or
+    in scattered dissipations of show, amusement, or the worse which
+    these shows and amusements are but terribly akin to, women give
+    purpose to and direct the results of all men's work. If the false
+    standards of living first urge them, until at length the horrible
+    intoxication of the game itself drives them on further and deeper,
+    are we less responsible for the last state of those men than for
+    the first?
+
+    Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a
+    simpler and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would
+    take them anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more
+    unmitigated evil? Ah, there come both answer and errand again.
+    Raise the fallen--at least save the growing womanhood--stop the
+    destruction that rushes accelerating on, before you challenge new
+    difficulty and danger with an indiscriminate franchise. Are not
+    these bad women the very "plenty" that would out-balance you at
+    the polls, if you persist in trying the "patch-and-plaster" remedy
+    of suffrage and legislation?
+
+    Recognize the fact, the law, that your power, your high
+    commission, is inward--vital--formative, and casual. Bring all
+    questions of choice or duty to this test, will it work at the
+    heart of things, among the realities and forces? Try your own life
+    by this; remember that mere external is falsehood and death. The
+    letter killeth. Give up all that is only of the appearance--or
+    even chiefly so, in conscious delight and motive--in person,
+    surrounding pursuit. Let your self-presentation, your home-making
+    and adorning, your social effort and interest, your occupation
+    and use of talent, all shape and issue for the things that are
+    essentially and integrally good, and that the world needs to have
+    prevail. Until you can do this, and induce such doing, it is of
+    little use to clamor for mere outward right, or to contend that it
+    would be rightly applied.
+
+    Work as you will, and widely as you can, for schools, in
+    associations, in everything whose end is to teach, enlighten,
+    enlarge women, and so the world. Help and protect the industries
+    of women; but keep those industries within the guiding law of
+    woman-life. Do not throw down barriers that take down safeguards
+    with them; that make threatening breaches in the very social
+    structure. If women must serve in shops, demand and care for it
+    that it shall be in a less mixed, a more shielded way than now.
+    The great caravansaries of trade are perilous by their throng,
+    publicity, and weariness. There used to be women's shops; choice
+    places, where a woman's care and taste had ruled before the
+    counters were spread; where women could quietly purchase things
+    that were sure to be beautiful or of good service; there were not
+    the tumult and ransacking that kill both shop-girl and shopper
+    now.
+
+    This is one instance, and but one, of the rescuing that ought
+    to be attempted. There ought at least to be distinct women's
+    departments, presided over by women of good, motherly tone and
+    character, in the places of business which women so frequent, and
+    where the thoughtful are aware of much that makes them tremble.
+    And surely a great many of the girls and women who choose
+    shop-work, because they like its excitement, ought rather to be in
+    homes, rendering womanly service, and preparing to serve in homes
+    of their own--leaving their present places to young men who might
+    perhaps begin so to earn the homes to offer them. Will not this
+    apply all the way up, into the arts and the professions even?
+    There must needs be exceptional women perhaps; there are, and will
+    be, time and errand and place for them; but Heaven forbid that
+    they should all become exceptional.
+
+    Once more, work for these things that are behind, and underlie;
+    believing that woman's place is behind and within, not of
+    repression, but of power; and that if she do not fill this place
+    it will be empty; there will be no main spring. Meanwhile she will
+    get her rights as she rises to them, and her defenses where she
+    needs them; everything that helps, defends, uplifts the woman
+    uplifts man and the whole fabric, and man has begun to find it
+    out. If he "will give the suffrage if women want it," as is said,
+    why shall he not as well give them the things that they want
+    suffrage for and that they are capable of representing? Believe
+    me, this work, and the representation which grows out of it,
+    can no longer be done if we attempt the handling of political
+    machinery--the making of platforms, the judging of candidates, the
+    measuring and disputation of party plans and issues, and all the
+    tortuous following up of public and personal political history.
+
+    Do you say, men have their individual work in the world, and all
+    this beside and of it, and that therefore we may? Exactly here
+    comes in again the law of the interior. Their work is "of
+    it"--falls in the way. They rub against it as they go along. Men
+    meet each other in the business thoroughfares, at the offices and
+    the street corners; we are in the dear depths of home. We are with
+    the little ones, of whom is not this kingdom, but the kingdom of
+    heaven, which we, through them, may help to come. This is just
+    where we must abandon our work, if we attempt the doing of theirs.
+    And here is where our prestige will desert us, whenever great
+    cause calls us to speak from out our seclusions, and show men,
+    from our insights and our place, the occasion and desire that look
+    unto their rule. They will not listen then; they will remand us to
+    the ballot-box.
+
+    "Inside politics" is a good word. That is just where woman ought
+    to be, as she ought to be inside everything, insisting upon and
+    implanting the truth and right that are to conquer. And she can
+    not be inside and outside both. She can not do the mothering
+    and the home-making, the watching and ministry, the earning and
+    maintaining hold and privilege and motive influence behind and
+    through the acts of men--and all the world-wide execution of act
+    beside. Therefore, we say, do not give up the substance which you
+    might seize, for the shadow which you could not hold fast if you
+    were to seem to grasp it. Work on at the foundations. Insist on
+    truth and right; put them into all your own life, taking all the
+    beam out of your own eye before demanding--well, we will say the
+    mote, for generosity's sake, and for the holy authority of the
+    word--out of the brother's eyes.
+
+    Establish pure, honest, lovely things--things of good report--in
+    the nurseries, the schools, the social circles where you reign,
+    and the outside world and issue will take form and heed for
+    themselves. The nation, of which the family is the root, will be
+    made, and built, and saved accordingly. Every seed hath its own
+    body. The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent-head of
+    evil, and shall rise triumphant to become the ennobled, recreated
+    commonwealth. Then shall pour forth the double paean that thrills
+    through the glorious final chorus of Schumann's Faust--men and
+    women answering in antiphons--
+
+      "The indescribable,
+        Here it is done;
+      The ever-womanly
+        Beckons us on!"
+
+    Then shall Mary--the fulfilled, ennobled womanhood--sing her
+    Magnificat; standing to receive from the Lord, and to give the
+    living word to the nations:
+
+      "My soul doth magnify the Lord,
+      And my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my Saviour.
+      For He hath looked upon the low estate of His handmaiden;
+      For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed,
+      For He that is mighty hath done to me great things;
+      And holy is His name.
+      And His mercy is unto generations and generations."
+
+    The coming new version of the Old Testament gives us, we are told,
+    among other more perfect renderings, this one, which fitly utters
+    charge and promise:
+
+      "The Lord gave the word;
+      Great was the company
+        Of those
+      That published it."
+
+      "The Lord giveth the word;
+      And the women that bring
+        Glad tidings
+      Are a great host."
+
+    ADELINE D.T. WHITNEY.
+
+Mr. BLAIR. Mr. President, before the vote is taken I desire to say but
+a word. Early in the session I had the opportunity of addressing the
+Senate upon the general merits of the question. I said then all that I
+cared to say; but I wish to remind the Senate before the vote is taken
+that the question to be decided is not whether upon the whole the
+suffrage should be extended to women, but whether in the proper arena
+for the amendment of the Constitution ordained by the Constitution
+itself one-third of the American people shall have the opportunity to
+be heard in the discussion of such a proposed amendment--whether they
+shall have the opportunity of the exercise of the first right of
+republican government and of the American and of any free citizen,
+the submission to the popular tribunal, which has alone the power to
+decide the question whether on the whole, upon a comparison of the
+arguments pro and con bearing one way and the other upon this great
+subject, the American people will extend the suffrage to those who are
+now deprived of it.
+
+That is the real question for the Senate to consider. It is not
+whether the Senate would, itself, extend the suffrage to women, but
+whether those men who believe that women should have the suffrage
+shall be heard, so that there may be a decision and an end made of
+this great subject, which has now been under discussion more than
+a quarter of a century, and to-day for the first time even in the
+legislative body which is to submit the proposition to the country for
+consideration has there been a prospect of reaching a vote.
+
+I appeal to Senators not to decide this question upon the arguments
+which have been offered here to-day for or against the merits of the
+proposition. I appeal to them to decide this question upon that other
+principle to which I have adverted, whether one-third of the American
+people shall be permitted to go into the arena of public discussion
+of the States, among the people of the States, and before the
+Legislatures of the States, and be heard upon the issue, shall
+the general Constitution be so amended as to extend this right of
+suffrage? If, with this opportunity, those who believe in woman
+suffrage fail, they must be content; for I agree with the Senators
+upon the opposite side of the Chamber and with all who hold that if
+the suffrage is to be extended at all, it must be extended by the
+operation of existing law. I believe it to be an innate right; yet an
+innate right must be exercised only by the consent of the controling
+forces of the State. That is all that woman asks. That is all that any
+one asks who believes in this right belonging to her sex.
+
+As bearing simply upon the question whether there is a demand by a
+respectable number of people to be heard on this issue, I desire
+to read one or two documents in my possession. I offer in this
+connection, in addition to the innumerable petitions which have been
+placed before the Senate and before the other House, the petition of
+the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I take it that no Senator will
+raise the question whether this organization be or be not composed
+of the very _élite_ of the women of America. At least two hundred
+thousand of the Christian women of this country are represented in
+this organization. It is national in its character and scope; it is
+international, and it exists in every State and in every Territory of
+the Union. By their officers, Miss Frances E. Willard, the president;
+Mrs. Caroline B. Buell, corresponding secretary; Mrs. Mary A.
+Woodbridge, recording secretary; Mrs. L.M.N. Stevens, assistant
+recording secretary; Miss Esther Pugh, treasurer; Mrs. Zerelda G.
+Wallace, superintendent of department of franchise, and Mrs. Henrietta
+B. Wall, secretary of department of franchise, they bring this
+petition to the Senate. It has been indorsed by the action of the body
+at large. They say:
+
+    Believing that governments can be just only when deriving their
+    powers from the consent of the governed, and that in a government
+    professing to be a government of the people, all the people of a
+    mature age should have a voice, and that all class-legislation and
+    unjust discrimination against the rights and privileges of any
+    citizen is fraught with danger to the republic, and inasmuch as
+    the ballot in popular governments is a most potent element in all
+    moral and social reforms:
+
+    We, therefore, on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Christian
+    women engaged in philanthropic effort, pray you to use your
+    influence, and vote for the passage of a sixteenth amendment
+    to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting the
+    disfranchisement of any citizen on the ground of sex.
+
+I have also just received, in addition to other matter before the
+Senate, the petition of the Indianapolis Suffrage Association, or of
+that department of the Women's Christian Temperance Union which has
+the control of the discussion and management of the operations of the
+union with reference to the suffrage. I shall not take the time of the
+Senate to read it. The letter transmitting the petition is as follows:
+
+    INDIANAPOLIS, IND., _January_ 12, 1886.
+
+    DEAR SIR: I have sent the inclosed petitions and arguments to
+    every member on the Committee on Woman Suffrage, hoping if they
+    are read they may have some influence in securing a favorable
+    report for the passage of a sixteenth amendment, giving the ballot
+    to women.
+
+    Will you urge upon the members of the committee the importance of
+    their perusal?
+
+    Respectfully,
+
+    MRS. Z.G. WALLACE, _Sup't Dep't for Franchise of N.W.C.T.U._
+
+    Hon. H.W. BLAIR.
+
+I will add in this connection a letter lately received by myself,
+written by a lady who may not be so distinguished in the annals of the
+country, yet, at the same time, she has attained to such a position in
+the society where she lives that she holds the office of postmaster by
+the sanction of the Government, and has held it for many years. She
+seems, as other ladies have seemed, to possess the capacity to perform
+the duties of this governmental office, so far as I know, to universal
+satisfaction. At all events, it is the truth that no woman, so far as
+I have ever heard, holding the office of postmaster, and no woman who
+has ever held the position of clerk under the Government, or who has
+ever discharged in State or in Nation any executive or administrative
+function, has as yet been a defaulter, or been guilty of any
+misconduct or malversation in office, or contributed anything by her
+own conduct to the disgrace of the appointing or creating official
+power. This woman says:
+
+    NEW LONDON, WIS., _January 18, 1887_.
+
+    Hon. H.W. BLAIR, _Washington, D.C._:
+
+    DEAR SIR: Thank you for the address you sent; also for your
+    kindness in remembering us poor mortals who can scarcely get a
+    hearing in such an august body as the Senate of these United
+    States, though I have reason to believe we furnished the men to
+    fill those seats.
+
+    There is something supremely ridiculous in the attitude of a man
+    who tells you women are angelic in their nature; that it is his
+    veneration for the high and lofty position they occupy which hopes
+    to keep them forever from the dirty vortex of politics, and then
+    to see him glower at her because she wishes politics were not so
+    dirty, and believes the mother element, by all that makes humanity
+    to her doubly sacred, is just what is needed for its purification.
+
+    We have become tired of hearing and reiterating the same old
+    theories and are pleased that you branched out in a new direction,
+    and your argument contains so much which is new and fresh.
+
+    We do care for this inestimable boon which one-half the people of
+    this Republic have seized, and are claiming that God gave it to
+    them and are working very zealously to help God keep it for them.
+    (We will remember the Joshua who leads us out of bondage.)
+
+    I used to think the Prohibition party would be our Moses, but that
+    has only gone so far as to say, "You boost us upon a high and
+    mighty pedestal, and when we see our way clear to pull you after
+    us we will venture to do so; but you can not expect it while we
+    run any risk of becoming unpopular thereby."
+
+    Liberty stands a goddess upon the very dome of our Capitol,
+    Liberty's lamp shines far out into the darkness, a beacon to the
+    oppressed, a dazzling ray of hope to serf and bondsmen of other
+    climes, yet here a sword unforbidden is piercing the heart of the
+    mother whose son believes God has made us to differ so that he can
+    go astray and return. But, alas, he does not return.
+
+    Help us to stand upon the same political footing with our brother;
+    this will open both his and our eyes and compel him to stand upon
+    the same moral footing with us. Only this can usher in millenium's
+    dawn.
+
+This letter is signed, by Hannah E. Patchin, postmaster at New London,
+Wis.
+
+As bearing upon the extent of this agitation, I have many other
+letters of the same character and numerous arguments by women upon
+this subject, but I can not ask the attention of the Senate to them,
+for what I most of all want is a vote. I desire a record upon this
+question. However, I ought to read this letter, which is dated Salina,
+Kans., December 13, 1886. The writer is Mrs. Laura M. Johns. She is
+connected with the suffrage movement in that State, and as bearing
+upon the extent of this movement and as illustrative not only of the
+condition of the question in Kansas, but very largely throughout the
+country, perhaps, especially throughout the northern part of the
+country, I read this and leave others of like character, as they are,
+because we have not the time:
+
+    I am deeply interested in the fate of the now pending resolution
+    proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States,
+    conferring upon women the exercise of the suffrage. The right is
+    theirs now.
+
+    I see, in speaking to that resolution on December 8 in the Senate,
+    that you refer to Miss Anthony's experiences in the October
+    campaign in Kansas as evidence in part of the growth of interest
+    in this movement, and of sentiment favorable to it, and I am
+    writing now just to tell you about it.
+
+    When I planned and arranged for those eleven conventions in eleven
+    fine cities of this State, I thought I knew that the people of
+    Kansas felt a strong interest in the question of woman suffrage;
+    but when with Miss Anthony and others I saw immense audiences
+    of Kansas people receive the gospel of equal suffrage with
+    enthusiasm, saw them sitting uncomfortably crowded, or standing to
+    listen for hours to arguments in favor of suffrage for women: saw
+    the organization of strong and ably officered local, county, and
+    district associations of the best and "brainiest" men and women in
+    our first cities for the perpetuation of woman suffrage teachings;
+    saw people of the highest social, professional, and business
+    position give time, money and influence, to this cause; saw
+    Miss Anthony's life work honored and her fêted and most highly
+    commended, I concluded that I had before known but half of the
+    interest and favorable sentiment in Kansas on this question. These
+    meetings were very largely attended, and by all classes, and
+    by people of all shades of religious and political belief. The
+    representative people of the labor party were there, ministers,
+    lawyers, all professions, and all trades.
+
+    No audiences could have been more thoroughly representative of
+    the people; and as we held one (and more) convention in each
+    Congressional district in the State, we certainly had, from the
+    votes of those audiences in eleven cities, a truthful expression
+    of the feeling of the people of the State of Kansas on this
+    question. Many of the friends of the cause here are very willing
+    to risk our fate to the popular vote.
+
+    In our conventions Miss Anthony was in the habit of putting the
+    following questions to vote:
+
+    "Are you in favor of equal suffrage for women?"
+
+    "Do you desire that your Senators, INGALLS and PLUMB, and your
+    seven Congressmen shall vote for the sixteenth amendment to the
+    Federal Constitution?" and
+
+    "Do you desire your Legislature to extend municipal suffrage to
+    women?"
+
+    In response there always came a rousing "yes," except when the
+    vote was a rising one, and then the house rose in a solid body.
+    Miss Anthony's call for the negative vote was answered by silence.
+
+    Petitions for municipal suffrage in Kansas are rolling up
+    enormously. People sign them now who refused to do so last year. I
+    tell you it is catching. Many people here are disgusted with our
+    asking for such a modicum as municipal suffrage, and say they
+    would rather sign a petition asking for the submission of an
+    amendment to our State constitution giving us State suffrage. We
+    have speakers now at work all over the State, their audiences and
+    reception are enthusiastic, and their most radical utterances in
+    favor of woman are the most kindly received and gain them the most
+    applause.
+
+And further to the same effect. I shall offer nothing more of that
+kind, but I have come in possession of some data bearing upon the
+question of the intellect of woman. The real objection seems to me
+to he that she does not know enough to vote; that it is the ignorant
+ballot that is dangerous; but that is a subject which of course I have
+no time to go into. However, I have some data collected very recently,
+and at my request, by a most intelligent gentleman of the State of
+Maine. Either of the Senators from that State will bear witness as to
+the high character of this gentleman, Mr. Jordan. He sent the data to
+me a few days ago. They show the relative standing of the two sexes in
+the high schools in the State of Maine where they are being educated
+together, and in one of the colleges of that State:
+
+    _High school No_. 1.--Average rank on scale of 100.--1882: boys
+    88.7, girls 91; 1883: boys 88.2, girls 91.3; 1884: boys 88.8,
+    girls 91.9 (of the graduating class 7 girls and 1 boy were the
+    eight highest in rank for the four years' course); 1885: boys
+    88.6, girls 91.4 (eight highest in rank for four years' course,
+    4 boys and 4 girls); 1886: boys 88.2, girls 91 (eight highest in
+    rank for four years' course, 7 girls and I boy).
+
+    _High school No_. 2.--Average rank on scale of 100.--1886: boys
+    90, girls 98 (six highest in rank for four years' course, 6
+    girls).
+
+    _College_.--Average rank for fall term of the junior year on the
+    scale of 40.--1882: boys 37.75, girls 37.93; 1883: boys 38.03,
+    girls 38.70; 1884: boys 38.18, girls 88.59; 1885; boys 38.33,
+    girls 38.13.
+
+With only this last exception the average of the girls and young
+ladies in the high schools and at this institution of liberal training
+is substantially higher than that of the boys. I simply give that fact
+in passing, and there leave the matter.
+
+I desire in closing simply to call for the reading of the joint
+resolution. I could say nothing to quicken the sense of the Senate on
+the importance of the question about to be taken. It concerns one-half
+of our countrymen, one-half of the citizens of the United States, but
+it is more than that, Mr. President. This question is radical, and it
+concerns the condition of the whole human race. I believe that in the
+agitation of this question lies the fate of republican government, and
+in that of republican government lies the fate of mankind. I ask for
+the reading of the joint resolution.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. The joint resolution is before the Senate as in
+Committee of the Whole. It has been read. Does the Senator desire to
+have it read again?
+
+Mr. BLAIR. Has it been read this afternoon?
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. It has been.
+
+Mr. BLAIR. That is all then. Now, I wish to have printed in the
+RECORD, by reason of the printed matter that has gone into the RECORD
+upon the other side, the arguments of Miss Anthony and her associates
+before the Senate committee, which is out of print as a document.
+These arguments are very terse and brief. I think it only just that
+woman, who is most interested, should be heard, at least under the
+circumstances when she has herself been heard on the other side
+through printed matter. It will not be burdensome to the RECORD, and I
+ask that this be done.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair hears no objection to the suggestion.
+The document will be printed in the RECORD.
+
+The document is as follows:
+
+    ARGUMENTS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE, UNITED
+    STATES SENATE, MARCH 7, 1884.
+
+    By a committee of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention of
+    the National Woman Suffrage Association, in favor of a sixteenth
+    amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that shall
+    protect the right of women citizens to vote in the several States
+    of the Union.
+
+    _Order of proceeding_.
+
+    The CHAIRMAN (Senator COCKRELL). We have allotted the time to be
+    divided as the speakers may desire among themselves. We are now
+    ready to hear the ladies.
+
+    Miss SUSAN B. ANTHONY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the select
+    committee: This is the sixteenth time that we have come before
+    Congress in person, and the nineteenth annually by petitions. Ever
+    since the war, from the winter of 1865-'66, we have regularly sent
+    up petitions asking for the national protection of the citizen's
+    right to vote when the citizen happens to be a woman. We are here
+    again for the same purpose. I do not propose to speak now, but to
+    introduce the other speakers, and at the close perhaps will state
+    to the committee the reasons why we come to Congress. The other
+    speakers will give their thought from the standpoint of their
+    respective States. I will first introduce to the committee Mrs.
+    Harriet R. Shattuck, of Boston, Mass.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. HARRIET R. SHATTUCK.
+
+    Mrs. SHATTUCK. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen: It seems as if it were
+    almost unnecessary for us to come here at this meeting, because I
+    feel that all we have to say and all we have to claim is known to
+    you, and we can not add anything to what has been said in the past
+    sixteen years.
+
+    But I should like to say one thing, and that is, that in my work
+    it has seemed that if we could convince everybody of the motives
+    of the suffragists we would go far toward removing prejudices. I
+    know that those motives are very much misunderstood. Persons think
+    of us as ambitious women, who are desirous for fame, and who
+    merely come forward to make speeches and get before the public, or
+    else they think that we are unfortunate beings with no homes, or
+    unhappy wives, who are getting our livelihood in this sort of way.
+    If we could convince every man who has a vote in this Republic
+    that this is not the case, I believe we could go far toward
+    removing the prejudice against us. If we could make them see that
+    we are working here merely because we know that the cause is
+    right, and we feel that we must work for it, that there is a power
+    outside of ourselves which impels us onward, which says to us:
+    go forward and speak to the people and try to bring them up to a
+    sense of their duty and of our right. This is the belief that I
+    have in regard to our position on this question. It is a matter of
+    duty with us, and that is all.
+
+    In Massachusetts I represent a very much larger number of women
+    than is supposed. It has always been said that very few women wish
+    to vote. Believing that this objection, although it has nothing to
+    do with the rights of the cause, ought to be met, the association
+    of which I am president inaugurated last year a sort of canvass,
+    which I believe never had been attempted before, whereby we
+    obtained the proportion of women in favor and opposed to suffrage
+    in different localities of our State. We took four localities in
+    the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, and two in the country
+    districts, and one also of school teachers in nine schools of one
+    town. Those school teachers were unanimously in favor of suffrage,
+    and in the nine localities we found that the proportion of women
+    in favor was very large as against those opposed. The total of
+    women canvassed was 814. Those in favor were 405; those opposed,
+    44; indifferent, 166; refused to sign, 160; not seen, 39. This,
+    you see, is a very large proportion in favor. Those indifferent,
+    and those who were not seen, were not included, because we claim
+    that nobody can yet say that they are opposed or in favor until
+    they declare themselves; but the 405 in favor against the 44
+    opposed were as 9 to 1. These canvasses were made by women who
+    were of perfect respectability and responsibility, and they swore
+    before a justice of the peace as to the truth of their statements.
+
+    So we have in Massachusetts this reliable canvass of the number of
+    women in favor as to those opposed, and we find that it is 9 to 1.
+
+    These women, then, are the class whom I represent here, and they
+    are women who can not come here themselves. Very few women in the
+    country can come here and do this work, or do the work in their
+    States, because they are in their homes attending to their duties,
+    but none the less are they believers in this cause. We would not
+    any more than any man in the country ask a woman to leave her home
+    duties to go into this work, but a few of us are so situated that
+    we can do it, and we come here and we go to the State Legislatures
+    representing all the women of the country in this work.
+
+    What we ask is, not that we may have the ballot to obtain any
+    particular thing, although we know that better things will come
+    about from it, but merely because it is our right, and as a matter
+    of justice we claim it as human beings and as citizens, and as
+    moral, responsible, and spiritual beings, whose voice ought to be
+    heard in the Government, and who ought to take hand with men and
+    help the world to become better.
+
+    Gentlemen, you have kept women just a little step below you. It
+    is only a short step. You shower down favors upon us it is true,
+    still we remain below you, the recipients of favors without the
+    right to take what is our own. We ask that this shall be changed;
+    that you shall take us by the hand and lift us up to the same
+    political level with you, where we shall have rights with you, and
+    stand equal with you before the law.
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I will now introduce to the committee Mrs. May
+    Wright Sewall, of Indianapolis, who is the chairman of our
+    executive committee.
+
+    Mrs. SEWALL. Gentlemen of the committee: Gentlemen, I believe,
+    differ somewhat in their political opinions. It will not then
+    be surprising, I suppose, that I should differ somewhat from my
+    friend in regard to the knowledge that you probably possess upon
+    our question. I do not believe that you know all that we know
+    about the women of this country, for I believe that if you did
+    know even all that I know, and my knowledge is much more limited
+    than that of many of my sisters, long ago the sixteenth amendment,
+    for which we ask, would have been passed through your influence.
+
+    I remember that when I was here two years ago and had the honor of
+    appearing before the committee, who granted us, on that occasion,
+    what you are so kind and courteous to grant on this occasion, an
+    opportunity to speak before you, I told you that I represented at
+    least seventy thousand women who had asked for the ballot in my
+    State, and I tried then to remind the members of the committee
+    that had seventy thousand Indiana men asked for any measure from
+    the Congress that then occupied this Capitol, that measure would
+    have secured the most deliberate consideration from their hands,
+    and, in all probability, its passage by the Congress. Of that
+    there can be no doubt.
+
+    I do not wish to exaggerate my constituency, but during the last
+    two years, and since I had the honor of addressing the committee,
+    the work of woman suffrage has progressed very rapidly in
+    my State. The number of women who have found themselves in
+    circumstances to work openly, and whose spirit has been drawn into
+    it, has largely increased, and as the workers have multiplied
+    the results have increased. While we have not taken the careful
+    canvass that has been so wisely and judiciously taken in
+    Massachusetts, so that I can present to you the exact number of
+    women who would to-day appeal for suffrage, I know that I can,
+    far within the bounds of possible truth, state that while I
+    represented seventy thousand women in my State two years ago,
+    who desired the adoption of the sixteenth amendment, I represent
+    to-day twice that number.
+
+    Should any one come up from Indiana, pivotal State as it has been
+    long called in national elections, saying that he represented the
+    wish of one hundred and forty thousand Indiana men, gentlemen,
+    would you scorn his appeal? Would you treat it lightly? Not at
+    all. You know that it would receive the most candid consideration.
+    You know that it would receive not merely respectful
+    consideration, but immediate and prompt and just action upon your
+    part.
+
+    I have been told since I have reached Washington that of all women
+    in the country Indiana women have the least to complain of, and
+    the least reason for coming to the United States Capitol with
+    their petitions and the statement of their needs, because we have
+    received from our own Legislature such amendments and amelioration
+    of the old unjust laws. In one sense it is true that we are the
+    recipients in our own State of many civil rights and of a very
+    large degree of civil equality. It is true that as respects
+    property rights, and as respects industrial rights, the women of
+    my own State may perhaps be the envy of all other women in the
+    land, but, gentlemen, you have always told men that the greater
+    their rights and the more numerous their privileges the greater
+    their responsibilities. That is equally true of woman, and simply
+    because our property rights are enlarged, because our industrial
+    field is enlarged, because we have more women who are producers
+    in the industrial world, recognized as such, who own property in
+    their own names, and consequently pay taxes upon that property,
+    and thereby have greater financial and larger social, as well
+    as industrial and business interests at stake in our own
+    commonwealth, and in the manner in which the administration of
+    national affairs is conducted--because of all these privileges we
+    the more need the power which shall emphasize our influence upon
+    political action.
+
+    You know that industrial and property rights are in the hands of
+    the law-makers and the executors of the laws. Therefore, because
+    of our advanced position in that matter, we the more need the
+    recognition of our political equality. I say the recognition of
+    our political equality, because I believe the equality already
+    exists. I believe it waits simply for your recognition; that were
+    the Constitution now justly construed, and the word "citizens," as
+    used in your Constitution, justly applied it would include us, the
+    women of this country. So I ask for the recognition of an equality
+    that we already possess.
+
+    Further, because of what we have we ask for more. Because of the
+    duties that we are commanded to do, we ask for more. My friend has
+    said, and it is true in some respects, that men have always kept
+    us just a little below them where they could shower upon us
+    favors, and they have always done that generously. So they have,
+    but, gentlemen, has your sex been more generous in its favors
+    to women than women have been generous toward your sex in their
+    favors? Neither one can do without the other: neither can dispense
+    with the service of the other; neither can dispense with the
+    reverence of the other, with the aid of the other in domestic
+    life, in social life. The men of this nation are rapidly finding
+    that they can not dispense with the service of women in business
+    life. I know that they are also feeling the need of what they call
+    the moral support of women in their public life, and in their
+    political life.
+
+    I always feel that it is not for women alone that I appeal. As men
+    have long represented me, or assumed to do so, and as the men of
+    my own family always have done so justly and most chivalrously, I
+    feel that in my appeal for political recognition I represent them;
+    that I represent my husband and my brother and the interest of the
+    sex to which they belong, for you, gentlemen, by lifting the women
+    of the nation into political equality would simply place us where
+    we could lift you where you never yet have stood, upon a moral
+    equality with us. Gentlemen, that is true. You know it as well as
+    I. I do not speak to you as individuals; I speak to you as the
+    representatives of your sex, as I stand here the representative
+    of mine; and never until we are your equals politically will the
+    moral standard for men be what it now is for women, and it is
+    none too high. Let it grow the more elevated by our growth in
+    spirituality, by every aspiration which we receive from the God
+    whence we draw our life and whence we draw our impulses of life.
+    Let our standard remain where it is and be more elevated. Yours
+    must come up to match it, and never will it until we are your
+    equals politically. So it is for men, as well as for women, that I
+    make my appeal.
+
+    I know that there are some gentlemen upon this committee who, when
+    we were here two years ago, had something to say about the rights
+    of the States and of their disinclination to interfere with the
+    rights of the States in this matter. I have great sympathy with
+    the gentlemen from the South, who, I hope, do not forget that they
+    are representing the women of the South in their work here at the
+    national capital. Already some Northern States are making rapid
+    strides towards the enfranchisement of their women. The men of
+    some of the Northern States see that they can no longer accomplish
+    the purposes politically which they desire to accomplish without
+    the aid of the women of their respective States. Washington is
+    the third Territory that has added women to its voting force, and
+    consequently to its political power at the national capital
+    as well as its own capital. Oregon will undoubtedly, as her
+    representative will tell you to-day, soon add its women to its
+    voting force. The men who believe, that each State must be left
+    to do this for itself will soon find that the balance of power
+    between the North and South is destroyed, unless the women of the
+    South are brought forward to add to the political force of the
+    South as the women of the North are being brought forward to add
+    to the political force of the North.
+
+    This should not be acted upon as a partisan measure. We do not
+    appeal to you as Republicans or as Democrats. We have among us
+    Republicans and Democrats; we have our party affiliations. We, of
+    course, were reared with our brothers under the political belief
+    and faith of our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that
+    rearing as our brothers were. We shall go to strengthen both the
+    political parties, neither one nor the other the more, probably.
+    So that it is not as a partisan measure; it is as a just measure,
+    which is our due, not because of what we are, gentlemen, but
+    because of what you are, and because of what we are through you,
+    of what you shall be through us; of what we, men and women, both
+    are by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one mother
+    eternal, the spirit created and progressive, that has thus far
+    sustained us, and that will carry us and you forward to the action
+    which we demand of you to take, and to the results which we
+    anticipate will attend upon that action.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR.
+
+    Miss Anthony. I think I will call upon the other representative
+    of the State of Indiana to speak now, Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, of
+    Lafayette, Ind.
+
+    Mrs. Gougar. Gentlemen, we are here on behalf of the women
+    citizens of this Republic, asking for political freedom. I
+    maintain that there is no political question paramount to that
+    of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political
+    parties would fain have us believe that tariff is the great
+    question of the hour. Political parties know better. It is an
+    insult to the intelligence of the present hour to say that when
+    one-half of the citizens of this Republic are denied a direct
+    voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that tariff,
+    or that the civil rights of the negro, or any other question that
+    can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom
+    to women. So I come to ask you, as representative men, making laws
+    to govern the women the same as the men of this country (and there
+    is not a law that you make in the United States Congress in which
+    woman has not an equal interest with man), to take the word "male"
+    out of the constitutions of the United States and the several
+    States, as you have taken the word "white" out, and give to us
+    women a voice in the laws under which we live.
+
+    You ask me why I am inclined to be practical in my view of this
+    question. In the first place, speaking from my own standpoint, I
+    ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall
+    live because the older empires of the earth are sending in upon
+    our American shores a population drawing very largely from
+    the asylums, yes, from the penitentiaries, the jails, and the
+    poor-houses of the Old World. They are emptying those men upon
+    our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the
+    ballot, the law-making power in this Republic, and they and their
+    representatives are seated in official and legislative positions.
+    I, as an American-born woman, to-day enter my protest at being
+    compelled to live under laws made by this class of men very
+    largely, and myself being rendered utterly incapable of the
+    protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not
+    have you take this right or privilege from those men whom we
+    invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense
+    foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent,
+    moral, native-born women of America.
+
+    Miss Anthony. And foreign women, too.
+
+    Mrs. Gougar. Miss Anthony suggests an amendment, and I indorse it
+    most heartily, and foreign women too, because if we let a foreign
+    man vote I say let the foreign woman vote. I am in favor of
+    universal suffrage.
+
+    Gentlemen, I ask this as a matter of justice; I ask it because it
+    is an insult to the intelligence of the present to draw the sex
+    line upon any right whatever. I know there are many objections
+    urged, and I am sure that you have considered this question; but
+    I only make the demand from the standpoint, not of sex, but of
+    humanity.
+
+    As a Northern woman, as a woman from Indiana, I know that we have
+    the intelligent, thinking, cultured, pure, patriotic men and
+    women with us. We have the women who are engaged in philanthropic
+    enterprises. We have in our own State the signatures of over 5,000
+    of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the
+    United States Government does not need the voice of those 5,000
+    educated school teachers as much as it needs the voice of the
+    240 male criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the
+    penitentiary of Indiana every year, who go to the ballot-box upon
+    every question whatever, and make laws under which those school
+    teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must
+    keep their homes and rear their children?
+
+    On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands
+    shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have
+    the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws that
+    shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority that only
+    has been made legal, but is never recognized, and so I ask you to
+    let the mothers carry their influence in protecting laws around
+    the footsteps of those boys, even after their hair has turned gray
+    and they have seats in the United States Congress. I ask you to
+    give them the power to throw protecting laws around those boys to
+    the very confines of eternity. This can be done in no indirect
+    way; it can not be done by the silent influence; it can not be
+    done by prayer. While I do not underestimate the power of prayer,
+    I say give me my ballot on election day that shall send pure
+    men, good men, intelligent men, statesmen, instead of the modern
+    politician, into our legislative halls. I would rather have that
+    ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised
+    women in the universe.
+
+    So I ask you to loosen our hands. I ask you to let us join with
+    you in developing this science of human government. What is
+    politics after all but the science of government? We are
+    interested in these questions, and we are investigating them
+    already. We have our opinions. Recently an able man has said that
+    we have been grandly developed physically and mentally, but as a
+    nation we are a political infant. So we are, gentlemen; we are
+    to-day in America politically simply an infant. Why is it? It
+    is because we have not recognized God's family plan in
+    government--man and woman together. He created the male and
+    female, and gave them dominion together. We have dominion in every
+    other interest in society, and why shall we not stand shoulder
+    to shoulder and have dominion, in the science in government, in
+    making the laws under which we shall live?
+
+    We are taxed to support this Government--this immense Capitol
+    building is built largely from the industries of the tax-paying
+    women of this country--and yet we are denied the slightest voice
+    in distributing our taxes. Our foreparents did not object to
+    taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation,
+    and we, as thinking, industrious, active American women, object to
+    taxation without representation. We are willing to contribute our
+    share to the support of this Government, as we always have done,
+    but we have a right to ask for our little yes and no in the
+    form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in
+    distributing the taxes.
+
+    Gentlemen, I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and
+    it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the
+    laws under which I shall he rewarded or punished. Am I asking too
+    much of you as representative men of this great Government when I
+    ask you to let me have a voice in making the laws under which I
+    shall be rewarded or punished? It is written in the law of every
+    State in this Union that a person in the courts shall have a jury
+    of his peers, yet so long as the word "male" stands as it does in
+    the Constitutions of the United States and the States no woman in
+    any State of this Union can have a jury of her peers, I protest in
+    the name of justice against going into the court-room and
+    being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and of the
+    saloon--yes, even of the police court and of the jail--as we are
+    compelled to do to select a male jury to try the interests of
+    women, whether relating to life, property, or reputation. So long
+    as the word "male" is in our constitutions just so long we can not
+    have a jury of our peers in any State in the Union.
+
+    I ask that the women shall have the right of the ballot that
+    they may go into our legislative halls and there provide for the
+    prevention rather than the cure of crime. I ask you on behalf of
+    the twelve hundred children under twelve years of age who are
+    in the poor-houses of Indiana, of the sixteen hundred in the
+    poor-houses of Illinois, and on that average in every State in
+    the Union, that you shall take the word "male" out of the
+    constitutions and allow the women of this country to sit in
+    legislative halls and provide homes for and look after the little
+    waifs of society. There are hundreds of moral questions to-day
+    requiring the assistance of the moral element of womanhood to help
+    make the laws under which we shall live.
+
+    Gentlemen, the political party that lives in the future must fight
+    the moral battles of humanity. The day of blood is passed; the
+    day of brain and heart is upon us; and I ask you to let the moral
+    constituency that resides in woman's nature be represented. Let
+    me say right here that I do not believe that there is morality in
+    sex, but the social customs have been such that woman has been
+    held to a higher standard. May the day hasten when the social
+    custom shall hold man to as high a moral standard as it to-day
+    holds woman.
+
+    This is the condition of things. The political party that presumes
+    to fight the moral battles of the future must have the women in
+    its ranks. We are non-partisan, as has been well said by my friend
+    from Indiana [Mrs. Sewall.] We come Democrats, Republicans, and
+    Greenbackers, and I expect if there were a half dozen other
+    political parties some of us would belong to them. We ask this
+    beneficent action upon your part because we believe that the
+    intelligence and the justice of the hour is demanding it. We
+    do not want a political party action. We want you to keep this
+    question out of the canvass. We ask you in the name of justice and
+    humanity alone, and not on the part of party.
+
+    I hold in my hand a petition sent from one district in the State
+    of Illinois with the request that I bear it to you. Out of three
+    hundred electors the names of two hundred stand in this petition
+    that I shall leave in your hands. In this list stand not the
+    wife-whippers, not the drunkards, not the dissolute, but
+    every minister in that town, every editor in that town, every
+    professional man in that town, every banker, and every prominent
+    business man in that town of three hundred electors. I believe
+    that petitions could be rolled up in this way in every town in the
+    Northern and in many of the Southern States. I leave this petition
+    with you for your consideration.
+
+    Upon no question whatever has such a large number of petitions
+    been sent as upon this demand for woman suffrage. You have the
+    petitions in your hands, and I ask you in the name of justice and
+    humanity not to let this Congress adjourn without action.
+
+    You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of
+    us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B.
+    Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside that of George
+    Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Wendell Phillips--I want that
+    woman to go to heaven a free angel from this Republic. The power
+    lies in your hands to make us all free. May the blessing of God be
+    upon the hearts of every one of you, gentlemen; may the scales
+    of prejudice fall from your eyes, and may you, representing the
+    Senate of the United States, have the grand honor of telegraphing
+    to us, to the millions of waiting women from one end of this
+    country to the other, that the sixteenth amendment has been
+    submitted to the ratification of the several legislatures of our
+    States striking the word "male" out of the constitutions; and that
+    this shall be, as we promise it to be, a government of the people,
+    for the people, and by the people.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY.
+
+    Miss Anthony. I now, gentlemen of the committee, introduce to you
+    Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, from the extreme Northwest; and before
+    she speaks I wish to say that she has been the one canvasser in
+    the great State of Oregon and Washington Territory, and that it is
+    to Mrs. Duniway that the women of Washington Territory are more
+    indebted than to all other influences for their enfranchisement.
+
+    Mrs. Duniway. Gentlemen of the committee, do you think it possible
+    that an agitation like this can go on and on forever without a
+    victory? Do you not see that the golden moment has come for this
+    grand committee to achieve immortality upon the grandest idea that
+    has ever stirred the heart-beats of American citizens, and will
+    you not in the magnanimity of noble purposes rise to meet the
+    situation and, accede to our demand, which in your hearts you must
+    know is just?
+
+    I do not come before you, gentlemen, with the expectation to
+    instruct you in regard to the laws of our country. The women
+    around us are law-abiding women. They are the mothers, many of
+    them, of true and noble men, the wives, many of them, of grand,
+    free husbands, who are listening, watching, waiting eagerly for
+    successful tidings of this great experiment.
+
+    There never was a grander theory of government than that of these
+    United States. Never were grander principles enunciated upon any
+    platform, never so grand before and never can be grander again,
+    than the declaration that "all men," including of course all
+    women, since women are amenable to the laws, "are created equal;
+    that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
+    rights * * * that to secure these rights governments are
+    instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
+    of the governed."
+
+    Gentlemen, are we allowed the opportunity of consent? These women
+    who are here from Maine to Oregon, from the Straits of Fuca to the
+    reefs of Florida, who in their representative capacity have come
+    up here so often, augmented in their numbers year by year, looking
+    with eyes of hope and hearts of faith, but oftentimes with hopes
+    deferred, upon the final solution of this great problem, which it
+    is so much in your hands to hasten in its solution--these women
+    are in earnest. My State is far away beyond the confines of the
+    Rocky Mountains, away over beside the singing Pacific sea, but the
+    spirit of liberty is among us there, and the public heart has been
+    stirred. The hearts of our men have been moved to listen to our
+    demands, and in Washington Territory, as one speaker has informed
+    you, women to-day are endowed with full and free enfranchisement,
+    and the rejoicing throughout that Territory is universal.
+
+    In Oregon men have also listened to our demand, and the
+    Legislature has in two successive sessions agreed upon a
+    proposition to amend our State constitution, a proposition which
+    will be submitted for ratification to our voters at the coming
+    June election. It is simply a proposition declaring that the right
+    of suffrage shall not hereafter be prohibited in the State of
+    Oregon on account of sex. Your action in the Senate of the United
+    States will greatly determine the action of the voters of Oregon
+    on our, or rather on their, election day, for we stand before the
+    public in the anomaly of petitioners upon a great question in
+    which we, in its final decision, are allowed no voice, and we can
+    only stand with expectant hearts and almost bated breath awaiting
+    the action of men who are to make this decision.
+
+    We have great hope for our victory, because the men of the broad,
+    free West are grand, and chivalrous, and free. They have gone
+    across the mighty continent with free steps; they have raised the
+    standard of a new Pacific empire; they have imbibed the spirit of
+    liberty with their very breath, and they have listened to us far
+    in advance of many of the men of the older States who have not
+    had their opportunity among the grand free wilds of nature for
+    expansion.
+
+    So all of our leaders are with us to-day. You may go to either
+    member of the Senate of the United States from Oregon, and while I
+    can not speak so positively for the senior member, as he came over
+    here some years ago before the public were so well educated as
+    now, I can and do proudly vouch for the late Senator-elect DOLPH,
+    who now has a seat upon the floor of the Senate, who is heart and
+    soul and hand and purse in sympathy with this great movement for
+    the enfranchisement of the women of Oregon. I would also be unjust
+    to our worthy representative in the lower house, Hon. M.C. George,
+    did I not proudly speak his name in this great connection. Men of
+    this class are with us, and without regard to party affiliations
+    we know that they are upon our side. Our governor, our associate
+    supreme judge for the district of the Pacific, all of these men,
+    are leading in the grand free way that characterizes the men of
+    the West in assisting in this work. But we have--alas, that I
+    should be compelled to say it--a great many men who pay no heed
+    whatever to this question. Men will be entitled to a voice in this
+    decision who are not, like members of Congress, the picked men of
+    the nation or the State, but men, many of whom can not read, who
+    will have an opportunity to decide this question as far as their
+    ballots can go. These are they to whom the enlightened, educated
+    motherhood of the State of Oregon must look largely for the
+    decision.
+
+    This brings me to the grand point of our coming to Congress. Some
+    of you say to us, "Why not leave this matter for settlement in
+    the different States?" When we leave it for settlement in the
+    different States we leave it just as I have told you, because of
+    the constitutional provisions of our organic law we can not
+    do otherwise; but if the question were to be settled by the
+    Legislature of Oregon alone it would be settled now; and I, as a
+    representative of that State only, would have no need of coming
+    here; it would be settled just as it has been settled in
+    Washington Territory; but when we come here to Congress it is
+    the great nation asking you to take such legislative action in
+    submitting an amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+    as shall recognize the equality of these women who are here; these
+    women who have come here from all parts of the country, whose
+    constituents are looking on while we are here before you. As we
+    reflect that our feeblest words uttered before this committee will
+    go to the confines of this nation and be cabled across the great
+    Atlantic and around the globe, we realize that more and more
+    prominently our cause is growing into public favor, and the time
+    is just upon us when some decision must be made.
+
+    Gentlemen of the committee, will you not recognize the importance
+    of the movement? Who among you will be our standard-bearer? Who
+    among you will achieve immortality by standing up in these halls
+    in which we are forbidden to speak, and in the magnanimity of your
+    own free wills and noble hearts champion the woman's cause and
+    make us before the law, as we of right ought now to be, free and
+    independent?
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. CAROLINE GILKEY ROGERS.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I now call upon Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers, of
+    Lansingburg, N.Y., to address the committee.
+
+    Mrs. ROGERS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, in our
+    efforts to secure the right of citizenship we appeal only to your
+    sense of justice and love of fair dealing.
+
+    We ask for the ballot because it is the symbol of equality. There
+    is no other recognized symbol of equality in this country. We ask
+    for the ballot that we may be equal to man before the law. We urge
+    a twofold right--our right to the Republic, the Republic's right
+    to us. We believe the interests of the country are identical with
+    the interests of all its citizens, including women, and that the
+    Government can no longer afford to shut women out from the affairs
+    of the State and nation, and wise men are beginning to know that
+    they are needed in the Government; that they are needed where our
+    laws are made as well as where they are violated.
+
+    Many admit the justice of our claim, but will say, Is it safe? Is
+    it expedient? It is always safe to do right; is always expedient
+    to be just. Justice can never bring evil in its train.
+
+    The question is asked how and what would the women do in the State
+    and nation? We do not pledge ourselves to anything. I claim that
+    we can not have a better government than that of the people. The
+    present Government is of only a part of the people. We have not
+    yet entered upon the system of higher arbitration, because the
+    Government is of man only. If we had been marching along with you
+    all this time I trust we should have reached a higher plane of
+    civilization.
+
+    We believe that all the virtue of the world can take care of
+    all the evil, and all the intelligence can take care of all the
+    ignorance. Let us have all the virtue confront all the vice.
+
+    There is no need to do battle in this matter. In all kindness and
+    gentleness we urge our claims. There is no need to declare war
+    upon men, for the best of men in this country are with us heart
+    and soul.
+
+    It is a common remark that unless some new element is infused into
+    our political life our nation is doomed to destruction. What more
+    fitting element than the noble type of American womanhood,
+    who have taught our Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen the
+    rudiments of all they know.
+
+    Think of all the foreigners and all our own native-born ignorant
+    men who can not write their own names or read the Declaration of
+    Independence making laws for such women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton
+    and Susan B. Anthony. Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to
+    watch and try young girls for crimes often committed against them
+    when the male criminal goes free. Think of a single one of these
+    votes on election day outweighing all the women in the country. Is
+    it not humiliating for me to sit, a political cipher, and see the
+    colored man in my employ, to whom I have taught the alphabet, go
+    out on election day and say by his vote what shall be done with my
+    tax money. How would you like it?
+
+    When we think of the wives trampled on by husbands whom the law
+    has taught them to regard as inferior beings, and of the mothers
+    whose children are torn from their arms by the direct behest of
+    the law at the bidding of a dead or living father, when we think
+    of these things, our hearts ache with pity and indignation.
+
+    If mothers could only realize how the laws which they have no
+    voice in making and no power to change affect them at every point,
+    how they enter every door, whether palace or hovel, touch, limit,
+    and bind, every article and inmate from the smallest child up, no
+    woman, however shrinking and delicate, can escape it, they would
+    get beyond the meaningless cry, "I have all the rights I want."
+    Do these women know that in most States in the Union the shameful
+    fact that no woman has any legal rights to her own child, except
+    it is born out of wedlock! In these States there is not a line
+    of positive law to protect the mother; the father is the legal
+    protector and guardian of the children.
+
+    Under the laws of most of the States to-day a husband may by his
+    last will bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she
+    might, if the guardian chose, never see it again.
+
+    The husband may have been a very bad man, and in a moment of
+    anger made the will. The guardian he has appointed may turn out a
+    malicious man, and take pleasure in tormenting the mother, or he
+    may bring up the children in a way that the mother thinks ruinous
+    to them, and she has no redress in law. Why do not all the
+    fortunate mothers in the land cry out against such a law? Why do
+    not all women say, "Inasmuch as the law has done this wrong unto
+    the least of these my sisters it has done it unto me." It is true
+    that men are almost always better than their laws, but while a bad
+    law remains on the statute-books it gives to an unscrupulous man a
+    right to be as bad as the law.
+
+    It is often said to us when all the women ask for the ballot
+    it will be granted. Did all the married women petition the
+    Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold
+    in their own name the property that belonged to them? To secure to
+    the poor forsaken wife the right to her earnings?
+
+    All the women did not ask for these rights, but all accepted them
+    with joy and gladness when they were obtained, and so it will be
+    with the franchise. But woman's right to self-government does not
+    depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the
+    same principles that man claims it for himself.
+
+    Where did man get the authority that he now claims to govern
+    one-half of humanity, from what power the right to place woman,
+    his helpmeet in life, in an inferior position? Came it from
+    nature? Nature made woman his superior when she made her his
+    mother--his equal when she fitted her to hold the sacred position
+    of wife. Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all
+    their claim to be their own law-makers?
+
+    The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Yes,
+    then, and then only, does he gain the authority.
+
+    It is all very well to say "convert the women." While we most
+    heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to
+    the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for
+    if this question is settled by the States it will be left to the
+    voters, not to the women to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women
+    through a sixteenth amendment of the national Constitution, it
+    will be decided by Legislatures elected by men. In neither case
+    will women have an opportunity of passing; upon the question. So
+    reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting
+    those to whom we must look for the removal of our disabilities,
+    which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage.
+
+    The arguments in favor of the enfranchisement of women are truths
+    strong and unanswerable, and as old as the free institutions of
+    our Government. The principle of "taxation without representation
+    is tyranny" applies to women as well as men, and is as true to-day
+    as it was a hundred years ago.
+
+    Our demand for the ballot is the great onward step of the century,
+    and not, as some claim, the idiosyncracies of a few unbalanced
+    minds.
+
+    Every argument that has been urged against this question of
+    woman's suffrage has been urged against every reform. Yet the
+    reforms have fought their way onward and become a part of the
+    glorious history of humanity.
+
+    So it will be with suffrage. "You can stop the crowing of the
+    cock, but you can not stop the dawn of the morning." And now,
+    gentlemen, you are responsible, not for the laws you find on the
+    statute books, but for those you leave there.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Mary Seymour
+    Howell, the president of the Albany, N.Y., State society.
+
+    Mrs. HOWELL. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: Miss
+    Anthony gives me five minutes. I shall have to talk very rapidly.
+    I ask you for the ballot because of the very first principle that
+    is often repeated to you, that "taxation without representation is
+    tyranny." I come from the city of Albany, where many of my sisters
+    are taxed for millions of dollars. There are three or four women
+    in the city of Albany who are worth their millions, and yet they
+    have no voice in the laws that govern and control them. One of our
+    great State senators has said that you can not argue five minutes
+    against woman suffrage without repudiating every principle that
+    this great Republic is founded upon.
+
+    I ask you also for the ballot for the large class of women who are
+    not taxed. They need it more than the women who are taxed, I have
+    found in every work that I have conducted that because I am a
+    woman I am not paid for that work as a man is paid for similar
+    work.
+
+    You have heard, and perhaps some of you are thinking--I hope
+    not--that women should be at home. I wish to say to you that there
+    are millions of women in the United States who have no homes.
+    There are millions of women who are trying to earn their bread and
+    hold their purity sacred. For that class of women I appeal to you.
+    In the city of Albany there are hundreds of women in our factories
+    making the shirts that you can buy for $1.50 and $2, and all those
+    women are paid for making the shirts is 4 cents apiece. There are
+    in the State of New York 18,000 teachers. When I was a teacher
+    and taught with gentlemen in our academies, I received about
+    one-fourth of the pay because I happened to be a woman. I consider
+    it an insult that forever burns in my soul, that I am to be handed
+    a mere pittance in comparison with what man receives for same
+    quality of work. When I was sent out by our superintendent of
+    public instruction to hold conventions of teachers, as I have
+    often done in our State of New York, and when I did one-third more
+    work than the men teachers so sent out, but because I was a woman
+    and had not the ballot, I was only paid about half as much as
+    the man; and saying that once to our superintendent of public
+    instruction in Albany, he said, "Mrs. Howell, just as soon as you
+    get the ballot and have a political influence in the work you will
+    have the same pay as a man."
+
+    We ask for the ballot for that great army of fallen women who walk
+    our streets and who break up our homes and ruin our husbands and
+    our dear boys. We ask it for those women. The ballot will lift
+    them up. Hundreds and thousands of women give up their purity for
+    the sake of starving children and families. There is many a woman
+    who goes to a life of degradation and pollution shedding burning
+    tears over her 4-cent shirts.
+
+    We ask for the ballot for the good of the race, Huxley says,
+    "admitting for the sake of argument that woman is the weaker,
+    mentally and physically, for that reason she should have the
+    ballot and should have every help that the world can give her."
+    When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the
+    purity, the spirituality, and the love of woman then those
+    legislative halls and those councils are apt to become coarse and
+    brutal, God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a
+    better land, and by our love and our intellect to help to make our
+    country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must
+    have states we men to bear them.
+
+    I ask you also for the ballot that I may decide what I am. I
+    stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a
+    "person" according to the law. It has been decided in some States
+    that we are not "persons." In the State of New York, in one
+    village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants. So I
+    should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an
+    inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may
+    become a citizen of this great Republic.
+
+    Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from
+    the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the
+    South. We are in dead earnest. A reform never goes backward. This
+    is a question that is before the American nation. Will you do your
+    duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver
+    hearts to do what must be done? For, like our forefathers, we will
+    ask until we have gained it.
+
+    Ever the world goes round and round; Ever the truth comes
+    uppermost; and ever is justice done.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I now have the pleasure of introducing to the
+    committee Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, of New York. New York is
+    a great State, and therefore it has three representatives here
+    to-day.
+
+    Mrs. BLAKE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: A recent
+    writer in an English magazine, in speaking of the great advantage
+    which to-day flows to the laboring classes of that nation from
+    having received the right of suffrage, made the statement that
+    disfranchised classes are oppressed, not because there is any
+    desire whatever to do injustice to them, but because they are
+    forgotten. We have year after year and session after session of
+    our legislatures and of our Congresses proved the correctness
+    of this statement. While we have nothing to complain of in the
+    courtesy which we receive in private life, still when we see
+    masses of men assembled together for political action, whether
+    it be of the nation or of the State, we find that the women are
+    totally forgotten.
+
+    In the limited time that is mine I cannot go into any lengthy
+    exposition upon this point. I will simply call your attention to
+    the total forgetfulness of the Congress of the United States to
+    the debt owed to the women of this nation during the war. You
+    have passed a pension bill upon which there has been much comment
+    throughout the nation, and yet, when an old army nurse applies
+    for a pension, a woman who is broken down by her devotion to the
+    nation in hospitals and upon the battle-field, she is met at the
+    door of the Pension Bureau by this statement, "the Government has
+    made no appropriation for the services of women in the war." One
+    of these women is an old nurse whom some of you may remember,
+    Mother Bickerdyke, who went out onto many a battle-field when she
+    was in the prime of life, twenty years ago, and at the risk of her
+    life lifted men, who were wounded, in her arms, and carried them
+    to a place of safety. She is an old woman now, and where is she?
+    What reward the nation bestowed to her faithful services? The
+    nation has a pension for every man who has served this nation,
+    even down to the boy recruit who was out but three months; but
+    Mother Bickerdyke, though her health has never been good since her
+    service then, is earning her living at the wash-tub, a monument to
+    the ingratitude of a Republic as great as was that when Belisarius
+    begged in the streets of Rome.
+
+    I bring up this illustration alone out of innumerable others
+    that are possible, to try to impress upon your minds that we are
+    forgotten. It is not from any unkindness on your part. Who would
+    think for one moment, looking upon the kindly faces of this
+    committee, that any man on it would do an injustice to women,
+    especially if she were old and feeble? But because we have no
+    right to vote, as I said, our interests are overlooked and
+    forgotten.
+
+    It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate
+    of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving
+    women the right of suffrage. I wish to remind you of the fact that
+    in the enormous immigration that pours to our shores every year,
+    numbering somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million, there
+    come, twice as many men as women. The figures for the last year
+    were two hundred and twenty-three thousand men, and one hundred
+    and thirteen thousand women.
+
+    What does this mean? It means a steady influx of this foreign
+    element; it means a constant preponderance of the masculine over
+    the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the
+    voting power of the foreigner as compared to the native born. To
+    those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by
+    this gigantic inroad of foreigners I commend the reflection that
+    the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign
+    nations or of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands
+    of the American-born women, And of all other women also, so that
+    if the foreign-born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be
+    always in a preponderance on the side of the liberty which is
+    secured by our institutions.
+
+    It is because, as many of my predecessors have said, of the
+    different elements represented by the two sexes, that we are
+    asking for this liberty. When I was recently in the capitol of my
+    own State of New York, I was reminded there of the difference of
+    temperament between the sexes by seeing how children act when
+    coming to the doors of the capitol, which have been constructed so
+    that they are very hard to open. Whether that is because they want
+    to keep us women out or not I am not able to say; but for some
+    reason the doors are so constructed that it is nearly impossible
+    to open them. I saw a number of little girls coming in through
+    those doors--every child held the door for those who were to
+    follow. A number of little boys followed just after, and every boy
+    rushed through and let the door shut in the face of the one
+    who was coming behind him. That is a good illustration of the
+    different qualities of the sexes. Those boys were not unkind, they
+    simply represented that onward push which is one of the grandest
+    characteristics of your sex; and the little girls, on the other
+    hand, represented that gentleness and thoughtfulness of others
+    which is eminently a characteristic of women.
+
+    This woman element is needed in every branch of the Government.
+    Look at the wholesale destruction of the forests throughout our
+    nation, which has gone on until it brings direct destruction
+    to the land on the lines of the great rivers of the West, and
+    threatens us even in New York with destroying at once the beauty
+    and usefulness of our far-famed Hudson. If women were in the
+    Government do you not think they would protect the economic
+    interests of the nation? They are the born and trained economists
+    of the world, and when you call them to your assistance you will
+    find an element that has not heretofore been felt with the weight
+    which it deserves.
+
+    As we walk through the Capitol we are struck with the significance
+    of the symbolism on every side; we view the adornments in the
+    beautiful room, and we find here everywhere emblematically woman's
+    figure. Here is woman representing even war, and there are women
+    representing grace and loveliness and the fullness of the harvest;
+    and, above all, they are extending their protecting arms over the
+    little children. Gentlemen, I leave you under this symbolism,
+    hoping that you will see in it the type of a coming day when we
+    shall have women and men united together in the national councils
+    in this great building.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY DR. CLEMENCE S. LOZIER.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I meant to have said, as I introduced Mrs. Blake,
+    that sitting on the sofa is Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, who declines
+    to speak, but I want her to stand up, because she represents New
+    York city.
+
+    Dr. LOZIER. I thank you, I am very happy to be here, but I am not
+    a fluent speaker. I feel in my heart that I know what justice
+    means; that I know what mercy means, and in all my rounds of duty
+    in my profession I am happy to extend not only food but shelter to
+    many poor ones. The need of the ballot for working-girls and those
+    who pay no taxes is not understood. The Saviour said, seeing the
+    poor widow cast her two mites, which make a farthing, into the
+    public treasury, "This poor widow hath cast more in than all they
+    which have cast into the treasury." I see this among the poor
+    working-girls of the city of New York; sick, in a little garret
+    bedroom, perhaps, and although needing medical care and needing
+    food, they will say to me, "above all things else, if I could
+    only pay the rent." The rent of their little rooms goes into the
+    coffers of their landlords and pays taxes. The poor women of the
+    city of New York and everywhere are the grandest upholders of this
+    Government. I believe they pay indirectly more taxes than the
+    monopoly kings of our country. It is for them that I want the
+    ballot.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Elizabeth
+    Boynton Harbert, of Illinois, and before Mrs. Harbert speaks
+    I wish to say that for the last six years she has edited a
+    department of the Chicago Inter-Ocean called the "Women's
+    Kingdom."
+
+    Mrs. HARBERT. Mr. Chairman and honorable gentlemen of the
+    committee, after the eloquent rhetoric to which you have listened
+    I merely come in these five minutes with a plain statement of
+    facts. Some friends have said, "Here is the same company of women
+    that year after year besiege you with their petitions." We are
+    here to-day in a representative capacity. From the great State of
+    Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State
+    who have recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot,
+    90,000 of these being citizens under the law--male voters; those
+    90,000 having signed petitions for the right of women to vote on
+    the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions;
+    50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote,
+    and nearly 60,000 more have signed petitions that the right of
+    suffrage might be accorded to woman.
+
+    This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs
+    of the children and the working-women of that great State. I
+    come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and
+    legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the
+    people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often
+    turned to the material and political interests of the nation. I
+    claim that the mother thought, the woman element needed, is
+    to supplement the concurrent statesmanship of American men on
+    political and industrial affairs with the domestic legislation of
+    the nation.
+
+    There are good men and women who believe that women should use
+    their influence merely through their social sphere. I believe both
+    of the great parties are represented by us. You remember that a
+    few weeks ago when there came across the country the news of
+    the decision of the Supreme Court as regards the negro race the
+    politicians sprang to the platform, and our editors hastened
+    to their sanctums, to proclaim to the people that that did not
+    interfere with the civil rights of the negro; that only their
+    social rights were affected, and that the civil rights of man,
+    those rights worth dying for, were not affected. Gentlemen, we who
+    are trying to help the men in our municipal governments, who are
+    trying to save the children from our poor-houses, begin to realize
+    that whatever is good and essential for the liberty of the black
+    man is good for the white woman and for all women. We are here to
+    claim that whatever liberty has done for you it should be allowed
+    to do for us. Take a single glance through the past; recognize the
+    position of American manhood before the world to-day, and whatever
+    liberty has done for you, liberty will surely do for the mothers
+    of the race.
+
+    MRS. SARAH E. WALL.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Gentlemen of the committee, here is another woman I
+    wish to show you, Sarah E. Wall, of Worcester, Mass., who, for the
+    last twenty-five years, has resisted the tax gatherer when he came
+    around. I want you to look at her. She looks very harmless, but
+    she will not pay a dollar of tax. She says when the Commonwealth
+    of Massachusetts will give her the right of representation she
+    will pay her taxes. I do not know exactly how it is now, but the
+    assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by
+    rather than have a lawsuit with her.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MISS SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I wish I could state the avocations and professions
+    of the various women who have spoken in our convention during the
+    last three days. I do not wish to speak disparagingly in regard to
+    the men in Congress, but I doubt if a man on the floor of either
+    House could have made a better speech than some of those which
+    have been made by women during this convention. Twenty-six States
+    and Territories are represented with live women, traveling all the
+    way from Kansas, Arkansas, Oregon, and Washington Territory. It
+    does seem to me that after all these years of coming up to this
+    Capitol an impression should be made upon the minds of legislators
+    that we are never to be silenced until we gain the demand. We
+    have never had in the whole thirty years of our agitation so many
+    States represented in any convention as we had this year.
+
+    This fact shows the growth of public sentiment. Mrs. Duniway is
+    here all the way from Oregon, and you say, when Mrs. Duniway is
+    doing so well up there, and is so hopeful of carrying the State
+    of Oregon, why do not you all rest satisfied with that plan of
+    gaining the suffrage? My answer is that I do not wish to see the
+    women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave
+    their homes and canvass each State, school district by school
+    district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class of people,
+    disfranchised by the constitution of every State in the Union. The
+    joint earnings of the marriage copartnership in all the States
+    belong legally to the husband. If the wife goes outside the home
+    to work, the law in most of the States permits her to own and
+    control the money thus earned. We have not a single State in the
+    Union where the wife's earnings inside the marriage copartnership
+    are owned by her. Therefore, to ask the vast majority of women who
+    are thus situated, without an independent dollar of their own, to
+    make a canvass of the States is asking to much.
+
+    Mrs. GOUGAR. Why did they not ask the negro to do that?
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Of course the negro was not asked to go begging
+    the white man from school district to school district to get his
+    ballot. If it was known that we could be driven to the ballot-box:
+    like a flock of sheep, and all vote for one party, there would
+    be a bid made for us; but that is not done, because we can not
+    promise you any such thing; because we stand before you and
+    honestly tell you that the women of this nation are educated
+    equally with the men, and that they, too, have political opinions.
+    There is not a woman on our platform, there is scarcely a woman
+    in this city of Washington, whether the wife of a Senator or a
+    Congressman--I do not believe you can find a score of women in the
+    whole nation--who have not opinions on the pending Presidential
+    election. We all have opinions; we all have parties. Some of us
+    like one party and one candidate and some another.
+
+    Therefore we can not promise you that women will vote as a unit
+    when they are enfranchised. Suppose the Democrats shall put a
+    woman suffrage plank in their platform in their Presidential
+    convention, and nominate an open and avowed friend of woman
+    suffrage to stand upon that platform; we can not pledge you that
+    all the women of this nation will work for the success of that
+    party, nor can I pledge you that they will all vote for the
+    Republican party if it should be the one to take the lead in their
+    enfranchisement. Our women will not toe a mark anywhere; they will
+    think and act for themselves, and when they are enfranchised they
+    will divide upon all political questions, as do intelligent,
+    educated men.
+
+    I have tried the experiment of canvassing four States prior to
+    Oregon, and in each State with the best canvass that it was
+    possible for us to make we obtained a vote of one-third. One man
+    out of every three men voted for the enfranchisement of the women
+    of their households, while two voted against it. But we are proud
+    to say that our splendid minority is always composed of the very
+    best men of the State, and I think Senator PALMER will agree with
+    me that the forty thousand men of Michigan who voted for the
+    enfranchisement of the women of his State were really the picked
+    men in intelligence, in culture, in morals, in standing, and in
+    every direction.
+
+    It is too much to say that the majority of the voters in any State
+    are superior, educated, and capable, or that they investigate
+    every question thoroughly, and cast the ballot thereon
+    intelligently. We all know that the majority of the voters of any
+    State are not of that stamp. The vast masses of the people, the
+    laboring classes, have all they can do in their struggle to get
+    food and shelter for their families. They have very little time or
+    opportunity to study great questions of constitutional law.
+
+    Because of this impossibility for women to canvass the States over
+    and over to educate the rank and file of the voters we come to
+    you to ask you to make it possible for the Legislatures of the
+    thirty-eight States to settle the question, where we shall have
+    a few representative men assembled before whom we can make our
+    appeals and arguments.
+
+    This method of settling the question by the Legislatures is just
+    as much in the line of States' rights as is that of the popular
+    vote. The one question before you is, will you insist that a
+    majority of the individual voters of every State must be converted
+    before its women shall have the right to vote, or will you
+    allow the matter to be settled by the representative men in the
+    Legislatures of the several States? You need not fear that we
+    shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress shall submit the
+    proposition, for even then we shall have a hard time in going
+    from Legislature to Legislature to secure the two-thirds votes of
+    three-fourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It
+    may take twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step
+    to make action by the State Legislatures possible.
+
+    I pray you, gentlemen, that you will make your report to the
+    Senate speedily. I know you are ready to make a favorable one.
+    Some of our speakers may not have known this as well as I. I ask
+    you to make a report and to bring it to a discussion and a vote on
+    the floor of the Senate.
+
+    You ask me if we want to press this question to a vote provided
+    there is not a majority to carry it. I say yes, because we want
+    the reflex influence of the discussion and of the opinions of
+    Senators to go back into the States to help us to educate the
+    people of the States.
+
+    Senator LAPHAM. It would require a two-thirds vote in both,
+    the House and the Senate to submit the amendment to the State
+    Legislatures for ratification.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I know that it requires a two-thirds vote of
+    both Houses. But still, I repeat, even if you can not get the
+    two-thirds vote, we ask you to report the bill and bring it to a
+    discussion and a vote at the earliest day possible. We feel that
+    this question should be brought before Congress at every session.
+    We ask this little attention from Congressmen whose salaries are
+    paid from the taxes; women do their share for the support of this
+    great Government, We think we are entitled to two or three days of
+    each session of Congress in both the Senate and House. Therefore I
+    ask of you to help us to a discussion in the Senate this session.
+    There is no reason why the Senate, composed of seventy-six of the
+    most intelligent and liberty-loving men of the nation, shall not
+    pass the resolution by a two-thirds vote, I really believe it will
+    do so if the friends on this committee and on the floor of the
+    Senate will champion the measure as earnestly as if it were to
+    benefit themselves instead of their mothers and sisters.
+
+    Gentlemen, I thank you for this hearing granted, and I hope the
+    telegraph wires will soon tell us that your report is presented,
+    and that a discussion is inaugurated on the floor of the Senate.
+
+    ARGUMENTS OF THE WOMAN-SUFFRAGE DELEGATES BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON
+    THE JUDICIARY OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE, JANUARY 23, 1880.
+
+    THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, UNITED STATES SENATE, _Friday,
+    January 23, 1880._
+
+    The committee assembled at half-past 10 o'clock a.m.
+
+    Present: Mr. Thurman, chairman; Mr. McDonald, Mr. Bayard, Mr.
+    Davis, of Illinois; Mr. Edmunds.
+
+    Also Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace, of Indiana; Mrs. Elizabeth L. Saxon,
+    of Louisiana; Mrs. Mary A. Stewart, of Delaware; Mrs. Lucinda
+    B. Chandler, of Pennsylvania; Mrs. Julia Smith Parker, of
+    Glastonbury, Conn.; Mrs. Nancy R. Allen, of Iowa; Miss Susan
+    B. Anthony, of New York; Mrs. Sara A. Spencer, of the city of
+    Washington, and others, delegates to the twelfth Washington
+    convention of the National Woman-Suffrage Association, held
+    January 2l and 22, 1880.
+
+    The CHAIRMAN. Several members of the committee are unable to
+    be here. Mr. Lamar is detained at his home in Mississippi by
+    sickness; Mr. Carpenter is confined to his room by sickness; Mr.
+    Conkling has been unwell; I do not know how he is this morning;
+    and Mr. Garland is chairman of the Committee on Territories, which
+    has a meeting this morning that he could not omit to attend. I do
+    not think we are likely to have any more members of the committee
+    than are here now, and we will hear you, ladies.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. ZERELDA G. WALLACE, OF INDIANA.
+
+    Mrs. WALLACE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, it is
+    scarcely necessary to recite that there is not an effect without a
+    cause. Therefore it would be well for the statesmen of this nation
+    to ask themselves the question, what has brought the women from
+    all parts of this nation to the capital at this time: the wives
+    and mothers, and sisters; the home-loving, law-abiding women? What
+    has been the strong motive that has taken us away from the quiet
+    and comfort of our own homes and brought us before you to-day? As
+    an answer partly to that question, I will read an extract from a
+    speech made by one of Indiana's statesmen, and probably if I tell
+    you his name his sentiments may have some weight with you. He
+    found out by experience and gave us the benefit of his experience,
+    and it is what we are rapidly learning:
+
+    "You can go to meetings; you can vote resolutions; you can attend
+    great demonstrations on the street; but, after all, the only
+    occasion where the American citizen expresses his acts, his
+    opinion, and his power is at the ballot-box; and that little
+    ballot that he drops in there is the written sentiment of the
+    times, and it is the power that he has as a citizen of this great
+    Republic."
+
+    That is the reason why we are here; that is the reason why we want
+    to vote. We are no seditious women, clamoring for any peculiar
+    rights, but we are patient women. It is not the woman question
+    that brings us before you to-day; it is the human question that
+    underlies this movement among the women of this nation; it is
+    for God, and home, and native land. We love and appreciate our
+    country; we value the institutions of our country. We realize that
+    we owe great obligations to the men of this nation for what
+    they have done. We realize that to their strength we owe the
+    subjugation of all the material forces of the universe which give
+    us comfort and luxury in our homes. We realize that to their
+    brains we owe the machinery that gives us leisure for intellectual
+    culture and achievement. We realize that it is to their education
+    we owe the opening of our colleges and the establishment of our
+    public schools, which give us these great and glorious privileges.
+
+    This movement is the legitimate result of this development, of
+    this enlightenment, and of the suffering that woman has undergone
+    in the ages past. We find ourselves hedged in at every effort
+    we make as mothers for the amelioration of society, as
+    philanthropists, as Christians.
+
+    A short time ago I went before the Legislature of Indiana with a
+    petition signed by 25,000 women, the best women in the State. I
+    appeal to the memory of Judge McDonald to substantiate the truth
+    of what I say. Judge McDonald knows that I am a home-loving,
+    law-abiding, tax-paying woman of Indiana, and have been for 50
+    years. When I went before our Legislature and found that 100 of
+    the vilest men in our State, merely by the possession of the
+    ballot, had more influence with the law-makers of our land than
+    the wives and mothers of the nation, it was a revelation that was
+    perfectly startling.
+
+    You must admit that in popular government the ballot is the most
+    potent means of all moral and social reforms. As members of
+    society, as those who are deeply interested in the promotion of
+    good morals, of virtue, and of the proper protection of men from
+    the consequences of their own vices, and of the protection of
+    women, too, we are deeply interested in all the social problems
+    with which you have grappled so long unsuccessfully. We do not
+    intend to depreciate your efforts, but you have attempted to do
+    an impossible thing. You have attempted to represent the whole by
+    one-half; and we come to you to day for a recognition of the fact
+    that humanity is not a unit; that it is a unity; and because we
+    are one-half that go to make up that grand unity we come before
+    you to-day and ask you to recognize our rights as citizens of this
+    Republic.
+
+    We know that many of us lay ourselves liable to contumely and
+    ridicule. We have to meet sneers; but we are determined that in
+    the defense of right we will ignore everything but what we feel to
+    be our duty.
+
+    We do not come here as agitators, or aimless, dissatisfied,
+    unhappy women by any means; but we come as human beings,
+    recognizing our responsibility to God for the advantages that have
+    come to us in the development of the ages. We wish to discharge
+    that responsibility faithfully, effectually, and conscientiously,
+    and we can not do it under our form of government, hedged in as we
+    are by the lack of a power which is such a mighty engine in our
+    form of government for every means of work.
+
+    I say to you, then, we come as one-half of the great whole. There
+    is an essential difference in the sexes. Mr. Parkman labored very
+    hard to prove what no one would deny--that there is an essential
+    difference in the sexes, and it is because of that very
+    differentiation, the union of which in home, the recognition of
+    which in society, brings the greatest happiness, the recognition
+    of which in the church brings the greatest power and influence for
+    good, and the recognition of which in the Government would enable
+    us finally, as near as it is possible for humanity, to perfect our
+    form of government. Probably we can never have a perfect form of
+    government, but the nearer we approximate to the divine the nearer
+    will we attain to perfection; and the divine government recognizes
+    neither caste, class, sex, nor nationality. The nearer we approach
+    to that divine ideal the nearer we will come to realizing our
+    hopes of finally securing at least the most perfect form of human
+    government that it is possible for us to secure.
+
+    I do not wish to trespass upon your time, but I have felt that
+    this movement is not understood by a great majority of people.
+    They think that we are unhappy, that we are dissatisfied, that
+    we are restive. That is not the case. When we look over the
+    statistics of our State and find that 60 per cent. of all the
+    crime is the result of drunkenness; when we find that 60 per cent.
+    of the orphan children that fill our pauper homes are the children
+    of drunken parents; when we find that after a certain age the
+    daughters of those fathers who were made paupers and drunkards by
+    the approbation and sanction and under the seal of the Government,
+    go to supply our houses of prostitution, and when we find that
+    the sons of these fathers go to fill up our jails and our
+    penitentiaries, and that the sober, law-abiding men, the
+    pains-taking, economical, and many of them widowed wives of this
+    nation have to pay taxes and bear the expenses incurred by such
+    legislation, do you wonder, gentlemen, that we at least want to
+    try our hand and see what we can do?
+
+    We may not be able to bring about that Utopian form of government
+    which we all desire, but we can at least make an effort. Under our
+    form of government the ballot is our right; it is just and proper.
+    When you debate about the expediency of any matter you have no
+    right to say that it is inexpedient to do right. Do right and
+    leave the result to God. You will have to decide between one
+    of two things: either you have no claim under our form of
+    Constitution for the privileges which you enjoy, or you will have
+    to say that we are neither citizens nor persons.
+
+    Realizing this fact, and the deep interest that we take in the
+    successful issue of this experiment that humanity is making for
+    self-government, and realizing the fact that the ballot never can
+    be given to us under more favorable circumstances, and believing
+    that here on this continent is to be wrought out the great problem
+    of man's ability to govern himself--and when I say man I use the
+    word in the generic sense--that humanity here is to work out
+    the great problems of self-government and development, and
+    recognizing, as I said a few minutes ago, that we are one-half of
+    the great whole, we feel that we ought to be heard when we come
+    before you and make the plea that we make to-day.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. JULIA SMITH PARKER, OF GLASTONBURY, CONN.
+
+    Mrs. PARKER. Gentlemen: You may be surprised, and not so much
+    surprised as I am, to see a woman of over four-score years of
+    age appear before you at this time. She came into the world and
+    reached years of maturity and discretion before any person in this
+    room was born. She now comes before you to plead that she can vote
+    and have all the privileges that men have. She has suffered so
+    much individually that she thought when she was young she had no
+    right to speak before the men; but still she had courage to get an
+    education equal to that of any man at the college, and she had
+    to suffer a great deal on that account. She went to New Haven to
+    school, and it was noised that she had studied the languages. It
+    was such an astonishing thing for girls at that time to have the
+    advantages of education that I had absolutely to go to cotillon
+    parties to let people see that I had common sense. [Laughter.]
+
+    She has suffered; she had to pay money. She has had to pay $200 a
+    year in taxes without the least privilege of knowing what becomes
+    of it. She does not know but that it goes to support grog-shops.
+    She knows nothing about it. She has had to suffer her cows to be
+    sold at the sign-post six times. She suffered her meadow land to
+    be sold, worth $2,000, for a tax of less than $50. If she could
+    vote as the men do she would not have suffered this insult; and so
+    much would not have been said against her as has been said if men
+    did not have the whole power. I was told that they had the power
+    to take any thing that I owned if I would not exert myself to
+    pay the money. I felt that fought to have some little voice in
+    determining what should be done with what I paid. I felt that I
+    ought to own my own property; that it ought not to be in these
+    men's hands; and I now come to plead that I may have the same
+    privileges before the law that men have. I have seen what a
+    difference there is, when I have had my cows sold, by having a
+    voter to take my part.
+
+    I have come from an obscure town (I can not say that it is obscure
+    exactly) on the banks of the Connecticut, where I was born. I
+    was brought up on a farm. I never had an idea that it could be
+    possible that I should ever come all the way to Washington to
+    speak before those who had not come into existence when I was
+    born. Now, I plead that there may be a sixteenth amendment, and
+    that women may be allowed the privilege of owning their own
+    property. That is what I have taken pains to accomplish. I have
+    suffered so much myself that I felt it might have some effect to
+    plead before this honorable committee. I thank you, gentlemen, for
+    hearing me so kindly.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. ELIZABETH L. SAXON, OF LOUISIANA,
+
+    Mrs. SAXON. Gentleman, I almost feel that after Mrs. Wallace's
+    plea there is scarcely a necessity for me to say anything; she
+    echoed my own feelings so entirely. I come from the extreme South,
+    she from the West. In this delegation, and in the convention which
+    has just been held in this city, women have come together who
+    never met before. People have asked me why I came.
+
+    I care nothing for suffrage so far as to stand beside men, or rush
+    to the polls, or take any privilege outside of my home, only, as
+    Mrs. Wallace says, for humanity. Years ago, when a little child,
+    I lost my mother, and I was brought up by a man. If I have not a
+    man's brain I had at least a man's instruction. He taught me that
+    to work in the cause of reform for women was just as great as to
+    work in the cause of reform for men. But in every effort I made in
+    the cause of reform I was combated in one direction or another.
+    I never took part with the suffragists. I never realized the
+    importance of their cause until we were beaten back on every aide
+    in the work of reform. If we attempted to put women in charge of
+    prisons, believing that wherever woman sins and suffers women
+    should be there to teach, help, and guide, every place was in the
+    hands of men. If we made an effort to get women on the school
+    boards we were combated and could do nothing. Everyplace seemed to
+    be changed, when there were good men in those places, by changes
+    of politics; and the mothers of the land, having had to prostrate
+    themselves as beggars, if not in fact, really in sentiment and
+    feeling, have become at last almost desperate.
+
+    In the State of Texas I had a niece living whose father was an
+    inmate of a lunatic asylum. She exerted as wide an influence in
+    the State of Texas as any woman there. I allude to Miss Mollie
+    Moore, who was the ward of Mr. Gushing. I give this illustration
+    as a reason why Southern women are taking part in this movement,
+    Mr. Wallace had charge of that lunatic asylum for years. He was a
+    good, honorable, able man. Every one was endeared to him; every
+    one appreciated him; the State appreciated him as superintendent
+    of this asylum.
+
+    When a political change was made and Governor Robinson came in,
+    Dr. Wallace was ousted for political purposes. It almost broke the
+    hearts of some of the women who had sons, daughters, or husbands
+    there. They determined at once to try to seek some redress and
+    have him reinstated. It was impossible. He was out, and what could
+    we do? I do not know that we could reach a case like that; but
+    such cases have stirred the women of the whole land, for the
+    reason that when they try to do good, or want to help in the cause
+    of humanity, they are combated so bitterly and persistently.
+
+    I leave it to older and abler women, who have labored in this
+    cause so long, to prove whether it is or is not constitutional to
+    give the ballot to women.
+
+    A gentleman said to me a few days ago, "These women want to
+    marry." I am married; I am a mother; and in our home the sons and
+    brothers are all standing like a wall of steel at my back. I have
+    cast aside every prejudice of the past. They lie like rotted hulks
+    behind me.
+
+    After the fever of 1878, when our constitutional convention was
+    going to convene, broke the agony and grief of my own heart, for
+    one of my children died, and took part in the suffrage movement in
+    Louisiana, with the wife of Chief-Justice Merrick, Mrs. Sarah A.
+    Dorsey, and Mrs. Harriet Keatinge, of New York, the niece of Mr.
+    Lozier. These three ladies aided me faithfully and ably. When they
+    found we would be received, I went before the convention. I went
+    to Lieutenant-Governor Wiltz, and asked him if he would present or
+    consider a petition which I wished to bring before the convention.
+    He read the petition. One clause of our State law is that no woman
+    can sign a will. We will have that question decided before the
+    meeting of the next Legislature. Some ladies donated property to
+    an asylum. They wrote the will and signed it themselves, and
+    it was null and void, because the signers were women. They not
+    knowing the law, believed that they were human beings, and signed
+    it. That clause, perhaps, will be wiped out. Many gentlemen signed
+    the petition on that account. I took the paper around myself.
+    Governor Wiltz, then lieutenant-governor, told me he would present
+    the petition. He was elected president of the convention. I
+    presented my first petition, signed by the best names in the city
+    of New Orleans and in the State.
+
+    I had the names of seven of the most prominent physicians there,
+    leading with the name of Dr. Logan, and many men, seeing the name
+    of Dr. Samuel Logan, also signed it. I went to all the different
+    physicians and ministers. Three prominent ministers signed it for
+    moral purposes alone. When Mrs. Horsey was on her dying bed the
+    last time she ever signed her name was to a letter to go before
+    that convention. No one believed she would die. Mrs. Merrick
+    and myself went before the convention. I was invited before the
+    committee on the judiciary. I made an impression favorable enough
+    there to be invited before the convention with these ladies. I
+    addressed the convention. We made the petition then that we make
+    here; that we, the mothers of the land, are barred on every side
+    in the cause of reform. I have strived hard in the work of reform
+    for women. I pledged my father on his dying bed that I would never
+    cease that work until woman stood with man equal before the law,
+    so far as my efforts could accomplish it. Finding myself baffled
+    in that work, I could only take the course which we have adopted,
+    and urge the proposition of the sixteenth amendment.
+
+    I beg of you, gentlemen, to consider this question apart from the
+    manner in which it was formerly considered. We, as the women of
+    the nation, as the mothers, as the wives, have a right to be
+    heard, it seems to me, before the nation. We represent precisely
+    the position of the colonies when they plead, and, in the words of
+    Patrick Henry, they were "spurned with contempt from the foot of
+    the throne." We have been jeered and laughed at and ridiculed; but
+    this question has passed out of the region of ridicule.
+
+    The moral force inheres in woman and in man alike, and unless we
+    use all the moral power of the Government we certainly can not
+    exist as a Government.
+
+    We talk of centralization, we talk of division; we have the seeds
+    of decay in our Government, and unless right soon we use the moral
+    force and bring it forward in all its strength and bearing, we
+    certainly cannot exist as a happy nation. We do not exist as a
+    happy nation now. This clamor for woman's suffrage, for woman's
+    rights, for equal representation, is extending all over the land.
+
+    I plead because my work has been combatted in the cause of reform
+    everywhere that I have tried to accomplish anything. The children
+    that fill the houses of prostitution are not of foreign blood and
+    race. They come from sweet American homes, and for every woman
+    that went down some mother's heart broke. I plead by the power of
+    the ballot to be allowed to help reform women and benefit mankind.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS OF MRS. MARY A. STEWART, OF DELAWARE.
+
+    Mrs. STEWART. I come from a small State, but one that is
+    represented in this Congress, I consider, by some of the ablest
+    men in the land. Our State, though small, has heretofore possessed
+    and to-day possesses brains. Our sons have no more right to brains
+    than our daughters, yet we are tied down by every chain that could
+    bind the Georgian slave before the war. Aye, we are worse slaves,
+    because the Georgian slave could go to the sale block and there be
+    sold. The woman of Delaware must submit to her chains, as there is
+    no sale for her; she is of no account.
+
+    Woman from all time has occupied the highest positions in the
+    world. She is just as competent to-day as she was hundreds of
+    years ago. We are taxed without representation; there is no
+    mistake about that. The colonies screamed that to England;
+    Parliament screamed back, "Be still; long live the king, and we
+    will help you." Did the colonies submit? They did not. Will the
+    women of this country submit? They will not. Mark me, we are the
+    sisters of those fighting Revolutionary men; we are the daughters
+    of the fathers who sang back to England that they would not
+    submit. Then, if the same blood courses in our veins that courses
+    in yours, dare you expect us to submit?
+
+    The white men of this country have thrown out upon us, the women,
+    a race inferior, you must admit, to your daughters, and yet that
+    race has the ballot, and why? He has a right to it; he earned and
+    paid for it with his blood. Whose blood paid for yours? Not your
+    blood; it was the blood of your forefathers; and were they not our
+    forefathers? Does a man earn a hundred thousand dollars and lie
+    down and die, saying, "It is all my boys'?" Not a bit of it. He
+    dies saying, "Let my children, be they cripples, be they idiots,
+    be they boys, or be they girls, inherit all my property alike."
+    Then let us inherit the sweet boon of the ballot alike.
+
+    When our fathers were driving the great ship of state we were
+    willing to ride as deck or cabin passengers, just as we felt
+    disposed; we had nothing to say; but to-day the boys are about to
+    run the ship aground, and it is high time that the mothers should
+    be asking, "What do you mean to do?" It is high time that the
+    mothers should be demanding what they should long since have had.
+
+    In our own little State the laws have been very much modified in
+    regard to women. My father was the first man to blot out the old
+    English law allowing the eldest son the right of inheritance to
+    the real estate. He took the first step, and like all those who
+    take first steps in improvement and reform he received a mountain
+    of curses from the oldest male heirs; but it did not matter to
+    him.
+
+    Since 1868 I have, by my own individual efforts, by the use of
+    hard-earned money, gone to our Legislature time after time and
+    have had this law and that law passed for the benefit of the
+    women; and the same little ship of state has sailed on. To-day our
+    men are just as well satisfied with the laws of our State for the
+    benefit of women in force as they were years ago. In our State a
+    woman has a right to make a will. In our State she can hold bonds
+    and mortgages as her own. In our State she has a right to her
+    own property. She can not sell it, though, if it is real estate,
+    simply because the moment she marries her husband has a life-time
+    right. The woman does not grumble at that; but still when he dies
+    owning real estate, she gets only the rental value of one-third,
+    which is called the widow's dower. Now I think the man ought to
+    have the rental value of one-third of the woman's maiden property
+    or real estate, and it ought to be called the widower's dower. It
+    would be just as fair for one as for the other. All that I want is
+    equality.
+
+    The women of our State, as I said before, are taxed without
+    representation. The tax-gatherer comes every year and demands
+    taxes. For twenty years have I paid tax under protest, and if I
+    live twenty years longer I shall pay it under protest every time.
+    The tax-gatherer came to my place not long since. "Well," said I,
+    "good morning, sir." Said he, "Good morning." He smiled and said,
+    "I have come bothering you." Said I, "I know your face well. You
+    have come to get a right nice little woman's tongue-lashing."
+    Said he, "I suppose so, but if you will just pay your tax I will
+    leave." I paid the tax, "But," said I, "remember I pay it under
+    protest, and if I ever pay another tax I intend to have the
+    protest written and make the tax-gatherer sign it before I pay the
+    tax, and if he will not sign that protest then I shall not pay the
+    tax, and there will be a fight at once." Said he, "Why do you keep
+    all the time protesting against paying this small tax?" Said I,
+    "Why do you pay your tax?" "Well," said he, "I would not pay it
+    if I did not vote." Said I, "That is the very reason why I do not
+    want to pay it. I can not vote and I do not want to pay it." Now
+    the women have no right when election day comes around. Who stay
+    at home from the election? The women and the black and white men
+    who have been to the whipping-post. Nice company to put your wives
+    and daughters in.
+
+    It is said that the women do not want to vote. Here is an array
+    of women. Every woman sitting here wants to vote, and must we be
+    debarred the privilege of voting because some luxurious woman,
+    rolling around in her carriage and pair in her little downy nest
+    that some good, benevolent man has provided for her, does not want
+    to vote?
+
+    There was a society that existed up in the State of New York
+    called the Covenanters that never voted. A man who belonged to
+    that sect or society, a man whiter-haired than any of you, said to
+    me, "I never voted. I never intended to vote, I never felt that
+    I could conscientiously support a Government that had its
+    Constitution blotted and blackened with the word 'slave,' and I
+    never did vote until after the abolition of slavery." Now, were
+    all you men disfranchised because that class or sect up in New
+    York would not vote? Did you all pay your taxes and stay at home
+    and refrain from voting because the Covenanters did not vote? Not
+    a bit of it. You went to the election and told them to stay at
+    home if they wanted to, but that you, as citizens, were going to
+    take care of yourselves. That was right. We, as citizens, want to
+    take care of ourselves.
+
+    One more thought and I will be through. The fourteenth and
+    fifteenth amendments give the right of suffrage to women, so
+    far as I know, although you learned men perhaps see a little
+    differently. I see through the glass dimly; you may see through it
+    after it is polished up. The fourteenth and fifteenth amendments,
+    in my opinion, and in the opinion of a great many smart men in the
+    country, and smart women, too, give the right to women to vote
+    without, any "ifs" or "ands" about it, and the United States
+    protects us in it; but there are a few who construe the law to
+    suit themselves, and say that those amendments do not mean that,
+    because the Congress that passed the fourteenth and fifteenth
+    amendments did not mean to do that. Well, the Congress that passed
+    them were mean enough for anything if they did not mean to do
+    that. Let the wise Congress of to-day take the eighth chapter and
+    the fourth verse of the Psalms, which says, "What is man, that
+    Thou art mindful of him?" and amend it by adding, "What is woman,
+    that they never thought of her?"
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. LUCINDA B. CHANDLER, OF PENNSYLVANIA.
+
+    Mrs. CHANDLER. Gentlemen, it will be conceded that the progress of
+    civilization, all that lifts humanity above a groveling, sensual,
+    depraved state, is marked by the position, intelligence, and
+    culture of women. Perhaps you think that American women have no
+    rightful claim to present; but American women and mothers do claim
+    that they should have the power to protect their children, not
+    only at the hearthstone, but to supervise their education. It is
+    neither presuming nor unwomanly for the mothers and women of the
+    land to claim that they are competent and best fitted, and that
+    it rightfully belongs to them to take part in the management and
+    control of the schools, and the instruction, both intellectual
+    and moral, of their children, and that in penal, eleemosynary, or
+    reformatory institutions women should have positions as inspectors
+    of prisons, physicians, directors, and superintendents.
+
+    I have here a brief report from an association which sent me as a
+    delegate to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, in which it is
+    stated that women in Pennsylvania can be elected as directors on
+    school boards or superintendents of schools, but can not help to
+    elect those officers. It must very readily occur to your minds
+    that when women take such interest in the schools as mothers must
+    needs take they must feel many a wish to control the election of
+    the officers, superintendents, and managers of the schools. The
+    ladies here from New York city could, if they had time, give you
+    much testimony in regard to the management of schools in New York
+    city, and the need there of woman's love and woman's power in the
+    schools and on the school boards. I am also authorized by
+    the association which sent me here to report that the
+    woman-suffragists and some other woman organizations of the city
+    of Philadelphia, have condemned in resolution the action of the
+    governor a year ago, I think, in vetoing a bill which passed
+    largely both houses of the Legislature to appoint women inspectors
+    of prisons. On such questions woman feels the need of the ballot.
+
+    The mothers of this land, having breathed the air of freedom and
+    received the benefits of education, have come to see the necessity
+    of better conditions to fulfill their divinely appointed and
+    universally recognized office. The mothers of this land claim that
+    they have a right to assist in making the laws which control the
+    social relations. We are under the laws inherited from barbarism.
+    They are not the conditions suited to the best exercise of the
+    office of woman, and the women desire the ballot to purge society
+    of the vices that are sure to disintegrate the home, the State,
+    the nation.
+
+    I shall not occupy your time further this morning. I only present
+    briefly the mother's claim, as it is so universally conceded. We
+    now have in our schools a very large majority of women teachers,
+    and it seems to me no one can but recognize the fact that mothers,
+    through their experience in the family, mothers who are at all
+    competent and fit to fulfill their position as mothers in the
+    family, are best fitted to understand the needs and at least
+    should have an equal voice in directing the management of the
+    schools, and also the management of penal and reformatory
+    institutions.
+
+    I was in hopes that Mrs. Wallace would give you the testimony she
+    gave us in the convention of the wonderful, amazing good that was
+    accomplished in a reformatory institution where an incorrigible
+    woman was taken from the men's prison and became not only very
+    tractable, but very helpful in an institution under the influence
+    and management of women. That reformatory institution is managed
+    wholly by women. There is not a man, Mrs. Wallace says, in the
+    building, except the engineer who controls the fire department.
+    Under a management wholly by women, the institution is a very
+    great success. We feel sure that in many ways the influence and
+    power that the mothers bring would tend to convert many conditions
+    that are now tending to destruction through vices, would tend
+    to elevate us morally, purify us, bring us still higher in the
+    standard of humanity, and make us what we ought to be, a holy as
+    well as a happy nation.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. SARA A. SPENCER, OF WASHINGTON.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. Miss Susan B. Anthony was chosen to present the
+    constitutional argument in our case before the committee. Unless
+    there is more important business for the individual members of the
+    committee than the protection of one-half of our population, I
+    trust that the limit fixed for our hearing will be extended.
+
+    The CHAIRMAN. Miss Anthony is entitled to an hour.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. Good. Miss Anthony is from the United States; the
+    whole United States claim her.
+
+    Mrs. ALLEN. I have made arrangements with Miss Anthony to say all
+    that I feel it necessary for me to say at this time.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. I have been so informed.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. NANCY B. ALLEN, OF IOWA.
+
+    Mrs. ALLEN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee:
+    I am not a State representative, but I am a representative of a
+    large class of women, citizens of Iowa, who are heavy tax-payers.
+    That is a subject which we are very seriously contemplating at
+    this time. There is now a petition being circulated throughout our
+    State, to be presented to the legislature, praying that women
+    be exempted from taxation until they have some voice in the
+    management of local affairs of the State. You may ask, "Do not
+    your husbands protect you? Are not all the men protecting you?" We
+    answer that our husbands are grand, noble men, who are willing to
+    do all they can for us, but there are many who have no husbands,
+    and who own a great deal of property in the State of Iowa.
+    Particularly in great moral reforms the women there feel the need
+    of the ballot. By presenting long petitions to the Legislature
+    they have succeeded in having better temperance laws enacted, but
+    the men have failed to elect officials who will enforce those
+    laws. Consequently they have become as dead letters upon the
+    statute-books.
+
+    I would refer again to taxes. I have a list showing that in my
+    city three women pay more taxes than all the city officials
+    included. Those women are good temperance women. Our city council
+    is composed almost entirely of saloon men and those who visit
+    saloons and brewery men. There are some good men, but the good men
+    being in the minority, the voices of these women are but little
+    regarded. All these officials are paid, and we have to help
+    support them. All that we ask is an equality of rights. As Sumner
+    said, "Equality of rights is the first of rights." If we can only
+    be equal with man under the law it is all that we ask. We do not
+    propose to relinquish our domestic circles; in fact, they are too
+    dear to us for that; they are dear to us as life itself, but we
+    do ask that we may be permitted to be represented. Equality of
+    taxation without representation is tyranny.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MISS SUSAN B. ANTHONY, OF NEW YORK.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY: Mr. Chairman and gentlemen: Mrs. Spencer said that I
+    would make an argument. I do not propose to do so, because I take
+    it for granted that the members of this committee understand that
+    we have all the argument on our side, and such an argument would
+    be simply a series of platitudes and maxims of government. The
+    theory of this Government from the beginning has been perfect
+    equality to all the people. That is shown by every one of the
+    fundamental principles, which I need not stop to repeat. Such
+    being the theory, the application would be, of course, that all
+    persons not having forfeited their right to representation in the
+    Government should be possessed of it at the age of twenty-one. But
+    instead of adopting a practice in conformity with the theory of
+    our Government, we began first by saying that all men of property
+    were the people of the nation upon whom the Constitution conferred
+    equality of rights. The next step was that all white men were
+    the people to whom should be practically applied the fundamental
+    theories. There we halt to-day and stand at a deadlock, so far as
+    the application of our theory may go. We women have been standing
+    before the American republic for thirty years, asking the men to
+    take yet one step further and extend the practical application of
+    the theory of equality of rights to all the people to the other
+    half of the people--the women. That is all that I stand here
+    to-day to attempt to demand.
+
+    Of course, I take it for granted that the committee are in
+    sympathy at least with the reports of the Judiciary Committees
+    presented both in the Senate and the House. I remember that after
+    the adoption of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments Senator
+    EDMUNDS reported on the petition of the ten thousand foreign-born
+    citizens of Rhode Island who were denied equality of rights in
+    Rhode Island simply because of their foreign birth; and in that
+    report held that the amendments were enacted and attached to the
+    Constitution simply for men of color, and therefore that their
+    provisions could not be so construed as to bring within their
+    purview the men of foreign birth in Rhode Island. Then the House
+    Committee on the Judiciary, with Judge Bingham, of Ohio, at its
+    head, made a similar report upon our petitions, holding that
+    because those amendments were made essentially with the black men
+    in view, therefore their provisions could not be extended to the
+    women citizens of this country or to any class except men citizens
+    of color.
+
+    I voted in the State of New York in 1872 under the construction
+    of those amendments, which we felt to be the true one, that all
+    persons born in the United States, or any State thereof, and under
+    the jurisdiction of the United States, were citizens, and entitled
+    to equality of rights, and that no State could deprive them of
+    their equality of rights. I found three young men, inspectors of
+    election, who were simple enough to read the Constitution and
+    understand it in accordance with what was the letter and what
+    should have been its spirit. Then, as you will remember, I was
+    prosecuted by the officers of the Federal court, And the cause was
+    carried through the different courts in the State of New York,
+    in the northern district, and at last I was brought to trial at
+    Canandaigua.
+
+    When Mr. Justice Hunt was brought from the supreme bench to sit
+    upon that trial, he wrested my case from the hands of the jury
+    altogether, after having listened three days to testimony, and
+    brought in a verdict himself of guilty, denying to my counsel even
+    the poor privilege of having the jury polled. Through all that
+    trial when I, as a citizen of the United States, as a citizen of
+    the State of New York and city of Rochester, as a person who had
+    done something at least that might have entitled her to a voice in
+    speaking for herself and for her class, in all that trial I not
+    only was denied my right to testify as to whether I voted or not,
+    but there was not one single woman's voice to be heard nor to be
+    considered, except as witnesses, save when it came to the judge
+    asking, "Has the prisoner any thing to say why sentence shall not
+    be pronounced?" Neither as judge, nor as attorney, nor as jury was
+    I allowed any person who could be legitimately called my peer to
+    speak for me.
+
+    Then, as you will remember, Mr. Justice Hunt not only pronounced
+    the verdict of guilty, but a sentence of $100 fine and costs of
+    prosecution. I said to him, "May it please your honor, I do not
+    propose to pay it;" and I never have paid it, and I never shall. I
+    asked your honorable bodies of Congress the next year--in 1874--to
+    pass a resolution to remit that fine. Both Houses refused it; the
+    committees reported against it; though through Benjamin F. Butler,
+    in the House, and a member of your committee, and Matthew H.
+    Carpenter, in the Senate, there were plenty of precedents brought
+    forward to show that in the cases of multitudes of men fines had
+    been remitted. I state this merely to show the need of woman to
+    speak for herself, to be as judge, to be as juror.
+
+    Mr. Justice Hunt in his opinion stated that suffrage was a
+    fundamental right, and therefore a right that belonged to the
+    State. It seemed to me that was just as much of a retroversion
+    of the theory of what is right in our Government as there could
+    possibly be. Then, after the decision in my case came that of Mrs.
+    Minor, of Missouri. She prosecuted the officers there for denying
+    her the right to vote. She carried her case up to your Supreme
+    Court, and the Supreme Court answered her the same way; that the
+    amendments were made for black men; that their provisions could
+    not protect women; that the Constitution of the United States has
+    no voters of its own.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. And you remember Judge Cartier's decision in my
+    case.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Mr. Cartier said that women are citizens and may be
+    qualified, &c., but that it requires some sort of legislation to
+    give them the right to vote.
+
+    The Congress of the United States notwithstanding, and the Supreme
+    Court of the United States notwithstanding, with all deference and
+    respect, I differ with them all, and know that I am right and that
+    they are wrong. The Constitution of the United States as it
+    is protects me. If I could get a practical application of the
+    Constitution it would protect me and all women in the enjoyment
+    of perfect equality of rights everywhere under the shadow of the
+    American flag.
+
+    I do not come to you to petition for special legislation, or for
+    any more amendments to the Constitution, because I think they are
+    unnecessary, but because you say there is not in the Constitution
+    enough to protect me. Therefore I ask that you, true to your own
+    theory and assertion, should go forward to make more constitution.
+
+    Let me remind you that in the case of all other classes of
+    citizens under the shadow of our flag you have been true to the
+    theory that taxation and representation are inseparable. Indians
+    not taxed are not counted in the basis of representation, and are
+    not allowed to vote; but the minute that your Indians are counted
+    in the basis of representation and are allowed to vote they are
+    taxed; never before. In my State of New York, and in nearly
+    all the States, the members of the State militia, hundreds and
+    thousands of men, are exempted from taxation on property; in my
+    State to the value of $800, and in most of the States to a value
+    in that neighborhood. While such a member of the militia lives,
+    receives his salary, and is able to earn money, he is exempted;
+    but when he dies the assessor puts his widow's name down upon the
+    assessor's list, and the tax-collector never fails to call upon
+    the widow and make her pay the full tax upon her property. In most
+    of the States clergymen are exempted. In my State of New York they
+    are exempted on property to the value of $1,500. As long as the
+    clergyman lives and receives his fat salary, or his lean one, as
+    the case may be, he is exempted on that amount of property; but
+    when the breath leaves the body of the clergyman, and the widow
+    is left without any income, or without any means of support, the
+    State comes in and taxes the widow.
+
+    So it is with regard to all black men. In the State of New York up
+    to the day of the passage of the fifteenth amendment, black men
+    who were willing to remain without reporting themselves worth as
+    much as $250, and thereby to remain without exercising the right
+    to vote, never had their names put on the assessor's list; they
+    were passed by, while, if the poorest colored woman owned 50 feet
+    of real estate, a little cabin anywhere, that colored woman's name
+    was always on the assessor's list, and she was compelled to pay
+    her tax. While Frederick Douglas lived in my State he was never
+    allowed to vote until he could show himself worth the requisite
+    $250; and when he did vote in New York, he voted not because he
+    was a man, not because he was a citizen of the United States, nor
+    yet because he was a citizen of the State, but simply because he
+    was worth the requisite amount of money. In Connecticut both black
+    men and black women were exempted from taxation prior to the
+    adoption of the fifteenth amendment.
+
+    The law was amended in 1848, by which black men were thus
+    exempted, and black women followed the same rule in that State.
+    That, I believe, is the only State where black women were exempted
+    from taxation under the law. When the fourteenth and fifteenth
+    amendments were attached to the Constitution they carried to the
+    black man of Connecticut the boon of the ballot as well as the
+    burden of taxation, whereas they carried to the black woman of
+    Connecticut the burden of taxation, but no ballot by which to
+    protect her property. I know a colored woman in New Haven, Conn.,
+    worth $50,000, and she never paid a penny of taxation until the
+    ratification of the fifteenth amendment. From that day on she is
+    compelled to pay a heavy tax on that amount of property.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. Is it because she is a citizen? Please explain.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Because she is black.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. Is it because the fourteenth and fifteenth
+    amendments made women citizens?
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Certainly; because it declared the black people
+    citizens.
+
+    Gentlemen, you have before you various propositions of amendment
+    to the Federal Constitution. One is for the election of President
+    by the vote of the people direct. Of course women are not people.
+
+    Senator EDMUNDS. Angels.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. Yes; angels up in heaven or else devils down there.
+
+    Senator EDMUNDS. I have never known any of that kind.
+
+    Miss ANTHONY. I wish you, gentlemen, would look down there and see
+    the myriads that are there. We want to help them and lift them up.
+    That is exactly the trouble with you, gentlemen; you are forever
+    looking at your own wives, your own mothers, your own sisters, and
+    your own daughters, and they are well cared for and protected; but
+    only look down to the struggling masses of women who have no one
+    to protect them, neither husband, father, brother, son, with no
+    mortal in all the land to protect them. If you would look down
+    there the question would be solved; but the difficulty is that you
+    think only of those who are doing well. We are not speaking for
+    ourselves, but for those who can not speak for themselves. We are
+    speaking for the doomed as much as you, Senator EDMUNDS, used to
+    speak for the doomed on the plantations of the South.
+
+    Amendments have been proposed to put God in the Constitution and
+    to keep God out of the Constitution. All sorts of propositions to
+    amend the Constitution have been made; but I ask that you allow no
+    other amendment to be called the sixteenth but that which shall
+    put into the hands of one-half of the entire people of the nation
+    the right to express their opinions as to how the Constitution
+    shall be amended henceforth. Women have the right to say whether
+    we shall have God in the Constitution as well as men. Women have a
+    right to say whether we shall have a national law or an amendment
+    to the Constitution prohibiting the importation or manufacture of
+    alcoholic liquors. We have a right to have our opinions counted on
+    every possible question concerning the public welfare.
+
+    You ask us why we do not get this right to vote first in the
+    school districts, and on school questions, or the questions
+    of liquor license. It has been shown very clearly why we need
+    something more than that. You have good enough laws to-day in
+    every State in this Union for the suppression of what are termed
+    the social vices; for the suppression of the grog-shops, the
+    gambling houses, the brothels, the obscene shows. There is plenty
+    of legislation in every State in this Union for their suppression
+    if it could be executed. Why is the Government, why are the States
+    and the cities, unable to execute those laws? Simply because there
+    is a large balance of power in every city that does not want those
+    laws executed. Consequently both parties must alike cater to that
+    balance of political power. The party that puts a plank in its
+    platform that the laws against the grog-shops and all the other
+    sinks of iniquity must be executed, is the party that will not get
+    this balance of power to vote for it, and, consequently, the party
+    that can not get into power.
+
+    What we ask of you is that you will make of the women of the
+    cities a balance of political power, so that when a mayor, a
+    member of the common council, a supervisory justice of the peace,
+    a district attorney, a judge on the bench even, shall go before
+    the people of that city as a candidate for the suffrages of the
+    people he shall not only be compelled to look to the men who
+    frequent the grog-shops, the brothels, and the gambling houses,
+    who will vote for him if he is not in favor of executing the law,
+    but that he shall have to look to the mothers, the sisters, the
+    wives, the daughters of those deluded men to see what they will do
+    if he does not execute the law.
+
+    We want to make of ourselves a balance of political power. What we
+    need is the power to execute the laws. We have got laws enough.
+    Let me give you one little fact in regard to my own city of
+    Rochester. You all know how that wonderful whip called the
+    temperance crusade roused the whisky ring. It caused the whisky
+    force to concentrate itself more strongly at the ballot-box than
+    ever before, so that when the report of the elections in the
+    spring of 1874 went over the country the result was that the
+    whisky ring was triumphant, and that the whisky ticket was elected
+    more largely than ever before. Senator Thurman will remember
+    how it was in his own State of Ohio. Everybody knows that if my
+    friends, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, Mrs. Allen, and all the women
+    of the great West could have gone to the ballot-box at those
+    municipal elections and voted for candidates, no such result would
+    have occurred; while you refused by the laws of the State to the
+    women the right to have their opinions counted, every rumseller,
+    every drunkard, every pauper even from the poor-house, and every
+    criminal outside of the State's prison came out on election day to
+    express his opinion and have it counted.
+
+    The next result of that political event was that the ring demanded
+    new legislation to protect the whisky traffic everywhere. In my
+    city the women did not crusade the streets, but they said they
+    would help the men to execute the law. They held meetings, sent
+    out committees, and had testimony secured against every man who
+    had violated the law, and when the board of excise held its
+    meeting those women assembled, three or four hundred, in the
+    church one morning, and marched in a solid body to the common
+    council chamber where the board of excise was sitting. As one
+    rum-seller after another brought in his petition for a renewal
+    of license who had violated the law, those women presented the
+    testimony against him. The law of the State of New York is that no
+    man shall have a renewal who has violated the law. But in not one
+    case did that board refuse to grant a renewal of license because
+    of the testimony which those women presented, and at the close of
+    the sitting it was found that twelve hundred more licenses had
+    been granted than ever before in the history of the State. Then
+    the defeated women said they would have those men punished
+    according to law.
+
+    Again they retained an attorney and appointed committees to
+    investigate all over the city. They got the proper officer to
+    prosecute every rum-seller. I was at their meeting. One woman
+    reported that the officer in every city refused to prosecute the
+    liquor dealer who had violated the law. Why? Because if he should
+    do so he would lose the votes of all the employés of certain shops
+    on that street, if another he would lose the votes of the railroad
+    employés, and if another he would lose the German vote, if another
+    the Irish vote, and so on. I said to those women what I say to
+    you, and what I know to be true to-day, that if the women of the
+    city of Rochester had held the power of the ballot in their hands
+    they would have been a great political balance of power.
+
+    The last report was from District Attorney Raines. The women
+    complained of a certain lager-beer-garden keeper. Said the
+    district attorney, "Ladies, you are right, this man is violating
+    the law, everybody knows it, but if I should prosecute him I would
+    lose the entire German vote." Said I, "Ladies, do you not see
+    that if the women of the city of Rochester had the right to vote
+    District Attorney Raines would have been compelled to have stopped
+    and counted, weighed and measured. He would have said, 'If I
+    prosecute that lager-beer German I shall lose the 5,000 German
+    votes of this city, but if I fail to prosecute him and execute the
+    laws I shall lose the votes of 20,000 women.'"
+
+    Do you not see, gentlemen, that so long as you put this power of
+    the ballot in the hands of every possible man, rich, poor, drunk,
+    sober, educated, ignorant, outside of the State's prison, to make
+    and unmake, not only every law and law-maker, but every office
+    holder who has to do with the executing of the law, and take the
+    power from the hands of the women of the nation, the mothers, you
+    put the long arm of the lever, as we call it in mechanics, in
+    the hands of the whisky power and make it utterly impossible for
+    regulation of sobriety to be maintained in our community? The
+    first step towards social regulation and good society in towns,
+    cities, and villages is the ballot in the hands of the mothers of
+    those places. I appeal to you especially in this matter, I do not
+    know what you think about the proper sphere of women.
+
+    It matters little what any of us think about it. We shall each and
+    every individual find our own proper sphere if we are left to
+    act in freedom; but my opinion is that when the whole arena of
+    politics and government is thrown open to women they will endeavor
+    to do very much as they do in their homes; that the men will look
+    after the greenback theory or the hard-money theory, that you will
+    look after free-trade or tariff, and the women will do the home
+    housekeeping of the government, which is to take care of the moral
+    government and the social regulation of our home department.
+
+    It seems to me that we have the power of government outside to
+    shape and control circumstances, but that the inside power, the
+    government housekeeping, is powerless, and is compelled to accept
+    whatever conditions or circumstances shall be granted.
+
+    Therefore I do not ask for liquor suffrage alone, nor for school
+    suffrage alone, because that would amount to nothing. We must be
+    able to have a voice in the election not only of every law-maker,
+    but of every one who has to do either with the making or the
+    executing of the laws.
+
+    Then you ask why we do not get suffrage by the popular-vote
+    method, State by State? I answer, because there is no reason why
+    I, for instance, should desire the women of one State of this
+    nation to vote any more than the women of another State. I have
+    no more interest as regards the women of New York than I
+    as regards the women of Indiana, Iowa, or any of the States
+    represented by the women who have come up here. The reason why I
+    do not wish to get this right by what you call the popular-vote
+    method, the State vote, is because I believe there is a United
+    States citizenship. I believe that this is a nation, and to be a
+    citizen of this nation should be a guaranty to every citizen of
+    the right to a voice in the Government, and should give to me
+    my right to express my opinion. You deny to me my liberty, my
+    freedom, if you say that I shall have no voice whatever in making,
+    shaping, or controlling the conditions of society in which I live.
+    I differ from Judge Hunt, and I hope I am respectful when I say
+    that I think he made a very funny mistake when he said that
+    fundamental rights belong to the States and only surface rights to
+    the National Government. I hope you will agree with me that the
+    fundamental right of citizenship, the right to voice in the
+    Government, is a national right.
+
+    The National Government may concede to the States the right to
+    decide by a majority as to what banks they shall have, what
+    laws they shall enact with regard to insurance, with regard to
+    property, and any other question; but I insist upon it that the
+    National Government should not leave it a question with the States
+    that a majority in any State may disfranchise the minority under
+    any circumstances whatsoever. The franchise to you men is not
+    secure. You hold it to-day, to be sure, by the common consent of
+    white men, but if at any time, on your principle of government,
+    the majority of any of the States should choose to amend the State
+    constitution so as to disfranchise this or that portion of the
+    white men by making this or that condition, by all the decisions
+    of the Supreme Court and by the legislation thus far there is
+    nothing to hinder them.
+
+    Therefore the women demand a sixteenth amendment to bring to women
+    the right to vote, or if you please to confer upon women their
+    right to vote, to protect them in it, and to secure men in their
+    right, because you are not secure.
+
+    I would let the States act upon almost every other question by
+    majorities, except the power to say whether my opinion shall
+    be counted. I insist upon it that no State shall decide that
+    question.
+
+    Then the popular-vote method is an impracticable thing. We tried
+    to get negro suffrage by the popular vote, as you will remember.
+    Senator Thurman will remember that in Ohio the Republicans
+    submitted the question in 1867, and with all the prestige of the
+    national Republican party and of the State party, when every
+    influence that could be brought by the power and the patronage of
+    the party in power was brought to bear, yet negro suffrage ran
+    behind the regular Republican ticket 40,000.
+
+    It was tried in Kansas, it was tried in New York, and everywhere
+    that it was submitted the question was voted down overwhelmingly.
+    Just so we tried to get women suffrage by the popular-vote method
+    in Kansas in 1867, in Michigan in 1874, in Colorado in 1877, and
+    in each case the result was precisely the same, the ratio of the
+    vote standing one-third for women suffrage and two-thirds against
+    women suffrage. If we were to canvass State after State we should
+    get no better vote than that. Why? Because the question of the
+    enfranchisement of women is a question of government, a question
+    of philosophy, of understanding, of great fundamental principle,
+    and the masses of the hard-working people of this nation, men and
+    women, do not think upon principles. They can only think on the
+    one eternal struggle wherewithal to be fed, to be clothed, and to
+    be sheltered. Therefore I ask you not to compel us to have this
+    question settled by what you term the popular-vote method.
+
+    Let me illustrate by Colorado, the most recent State, in the
+    election of 1877. I am happy to say to you that I have canvassed
+    three States for this question. If Senator Chandler were alive,
+    or if Senator Ferry were in this room, they would remember that I
+    followed in their train in Michigan, with larger audiences than
+    either of those Senators throughout the whole canvass. I want to
+    say, too, that although those Senators may have believed in woman
+    suffrage, they did not say much about it. They did not help us
+    much. The Greenback movement was quite popular in Michigan at that
+    time. The Republicans and Greenbackers made a most humble bow
+    to the grangers, but woman suffrage did not get much help. In
+    Colorado, at the close of the canvass, 6,666 men voted "Yes."
+    Now I am going to describe the men who voted "Yes." They were
+    native-born white men, temperance men, cultivated, broad,
+    generous, just men, men who think. On the other hand, 16,007 voted
+    "No."
+
+    Now I am going to describe that class of voters. In the southern
+    part of that State there are Mexicans, who speak the Spanish
+    language. They put their wheat in circles on the ground with
+    the heads out, and drive a mule around to thrash it. The vast
+    population of Colorado is made up of that class of people. I was
+    sent out to speak in a voting precinct having 200 voters; 150
+    of those voters were Mexican greasers, 40 of them foreign-born
+    citizens, and just 10 of them were born in this country; and I was
+    supposed to be competent to convert those men to let me have as
+    much right in this Government as they had, when, unfortunately,
+    the great majority of them could not understand a word that I
+    said. Fifty or sixty Mexican greasers stood against the wall with
+    their hats down over their faces. The Germans put seats in a
+    lager-beer saloon, and would not attend unless I made a speech
+    there; so I had a small audience.
+
+    MRS. ARCHIBALD. There is one circumstance that I should like to
+    relate. In the county of Las Animas, a county where there is a
+    large population of Mexicans, and where they always have a large
+    majority over the native population, they do not know our language
+    at all. Consequently a number of tickets must be printed for those
+    people in Spanish. The gentleman in our little town of Trinidad
+    who had the charge of the printing of those tickets, being adverse
+    to us, had every ticket printed against woman suffrage. The
+    samples that were sent to us from Denver were "for" or "against,"
+    but the tickets that were printed only had the word "against" on
+    them, so that our friends had to scratch their tickets, and all
+    those Mexican people who could not understand this trick and did
+    not know the facts of the case, voted against woman suffrage; so
+    that we lost a great many votes. This was man's generosity.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Special legislation for the benefit of woman! I will
+    admit you that on the floor of the constitutional convention was a
+    representative Mexican, intelligent, cultivated, chairman of the
+    committee on suffrage, who signed the petition, and was the first
+    to speak in favor of woman suffrage. Then they have in Denver
+    about four hundred negroes. Governor Routt said to me, "The
+    four hundred Denver negroes are going to vote solid for woman
+    suffrage." I said, "I do not know much about the Denver negroes,
+    but I know certainly what all negroes were educated in, and
+    slavery never educated master or negro into a comprehension, of
+    the great principles of human freedom of our nation; it is not
+    possible, and I do not believe they are going to vote for us."
+    Just ten of those Denver negroes voted for woman suffrage. Then,
+    in all the mines of Colorado the vast majority of the wage
+    laborers, as you know, are foreigners.
+
+    There may be intelligent foreigners in this country, and I know
+    there are, who are in favor of the enfranchisement of woman, but
+    that one does not happen to be Carl Schurz, I am ashamed to say.
+    And I want to say to you of Carl Schurz, that side by side with
+    that man on the battlefield of Germany was Madame Anneke, as noble
+    a woman as ever trod the American soil. She rode by the side of
+    her husband, who was an officer, on the battlefield; she slept in
+    battlefield tents, and she fled from Germany to this country, for
+    her life and property, side by side with Carl Schurz. Now, what is
+    it for Carl Schurz, stepping up to the very door of the Presidency
+    and looking back to Madame Anneke, who fought for liberty as
+    well as he, to say, "You be subject in this Republic; I will be
+    sovereign." If it is an insult for Carl Schurz to say that to
+    a foreign-born woman, what is it for him to say it to Mrs.
+    Ex-Governor Wallace, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott--to the
+    native-born, educated, tax-paying women of this Republic? I can
+    forgive an ignorant foreigner; I can forgive an ignorant negro;
+    but I can not forgive Carl Schurz.
+
+    Right in the file of the foreigners opposed to woman suffrage,
+    educated under monarchical governments that do not comprehend our
+    principles, whom I have seen traveling through the prairies of
+    Iowa or the prairies of Minnesota, are the Bohemians, Swedes,
+    Norwegians, Germans, Irishmen, Mennonites; I have seen them riding
+    on those magnificent loads of wheat with those magnificent Saxon
+    horses, shining like glass on a sunny morning, every one of them
+    going to vote "no" against woman suffrage. You can not convert
+    them; it is impossible. Now and then there is a whisky
+    manufacturer, drunkard, inebriate, libertine, and what we call
+    a fast man, and a colored man, broad and generous enough to be
+    willing to let women vote, to let his mother have her opinion
+    counted as to whether there shall be license or no license, but
+    the rank and file of all classes, who wish to enjoy full license
+    in what are termed the petty vices of men are pitted solid against
+    the enfranchisement of women.
+
+    Then, in addition to all these, there are, as you know, a few
+    religious bigots left in the world who really believe that somehow
+    or other if women are allowed to vote St. Paul would feel badly
+    about it. I do not know but that some of the gentlemen present
+    belong to that class. [Laughter.] So, when you put those best men
+    of the nation, having religion about everything except on this one
+    question, whose prejudices control them, with all this vast mass
+    of ignorant, uneducated, degraded population in this country,
+    you make an overwhelming and insurmountable majority against the
+    enfranchisement of women.
+
+    It is because of this fact that I ask you not to remand us back
+    to the States, but to submit to the States the proposition of a
+    sixteenth amendment. The popular-vote method is not only of itself
+    an impossibility, but it is too humiliating a process to compel
+    the women of this nation to submit to any longer.
+
+    I am going to give you an illustration, not because I have any
+    disrespect for the person, because on many other questions he was
+    really a good deal better than a good many other men who had not
+    so bad a name in this nation. When, under the old _régime_, John
+    Morrissey, of my State, the king of gamblers, was a Representative
+    on the floor of Congress, it was humiliating enough for Lucretia
+    Mott, for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for all of us to come down here
+    to Washington and beg at the feet of John Morrissey that he would
+    let intelligent, native-born women vote, and let us have as much
+    right in this Government and in the government of the city of New
+    York as he had. When John Morrissey was a member of the New York
+    State Legislature it would have been humiliating enough for us to
+    go to the New York State Legislature and pray of John Morrissey to
+    vote to ratify the sixteenth amendment, giving to us a right to
+    vote; but if instead of a sixteenth amendment you tell us to go
+    back to the popular-vote method, the old-time method, and go down
+    into John Morrissey's seventh Congressional district in the city
+    of New York, and there, in the sloughs and slums of that great
+    Sodom, in the grog-shops, the gambling-houses, and the brothels,
+    beg at the feet of each individual fisticuff of his constituency
+    to give the noble, educated, native-born, tax-paying women of
+    the State of New York as much right as he has, that would be too
+    bitter a pill for a native-born woman to swallow any longer.
+
+    I beg you, gentlemen, to save us from the mortification and the
+    humiliation of appealing to the rabble. We already have on our
+    side the vast majority of the better educated--the best classes of
+    men. You will remember that Senator Christiancy, of Michigan, two
+    years ago, said on the floor of the Senate that of the 40,000 men
+    who voted for woman suffrage in Michigan it was said that there
+    was not a drunkard, not a libertine, not a gambler, not a
+    depraved, low man among them. Is not that something that tells
+    for us, and for our right? It is the fact, in every State of the
+    Union, that we have the intelligent lawyers and the most liberal
+    ministers of all the sects, not excepting the Roman Catholics. A
+    Roman Catholic priest preached a sermon the other day, in which he
+    said, "God grant that there were a thousand Susan B. Anthonys in
+    this city to vote and work for temperance." When a Catholic priest
+    says that there is a great moral necessity pressing down upon this
+    nation demanding the enfranchisement of women. I ask you that you
+    shall not drive us back to beg our rights at the feet of the
+    most ignorant and depraved men of the nation, but that you, the
+    representative men of the nation, will hold the question in the
+    hollow of your hands. We ask you to lift this question out of the
+    hands of the rabble.
+
+    You who are here upon the floor of Congress in both Houses are the
+    picked men of the nation. You may say what you please about John
+    Morrissey, the gambler, &c.; he was head and shoulders above the
+    rank and file of his constituency. The world may gabble ever so
+    much about members of Congress being corrupt and being bought
+    and sold; they are as a rule head and shoulders among the great
+    majority who compose their State governments. There is no doubt
+    about it. Therefore I ask of you, as representative men, as men
+    who think, as men who study, as men who philosophize, as men who
+    know, that you will not drive us back to the States any more, but
+    that you will carry out this method of procedure which has been
+    practiced from the beginning of the Government; that is, that you
+    will put a prohibitory amendment in the Constitution and submit
+    the proposition to the several State legislatures. The amendment
+    which has been presented before you reads:
+
+        ARTICLE XVI.
+
+        SECTION 1. The right of suffrage in the United States shall
+        be based on citizenship, and the right of citizens of the
+        United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
+        United States, or by any State, on account of sex, or for any
+        reason not equally applicable to all citizens of the United
+        States.
+
+        SEC. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by
+        appropriate legislation.
+
+    In this way we would get the right of suffrage just as much by
+    what you call the consent of the States, or the States' rights
+    method, as by any other method. The only point is that it is a
+    decision by the representative men of the States instead of by
+    the rank and file of the ignorant men of the States. If you would
+    submit this proposition for a sixteenth amendment, by a two-thirds
+    vote of the two Houses to the several legislatures, and the
+    several legislatures ratify it, that would be just as much by the
+    consent of the States as if Tom, Dick, and Harry voted "yes" or
+    "no." Is it not, Senator? I want to talk to Democrats as well as
+    Republicans, to show that it is a State's rights method.
+
+    SENATOR EDMUNDS. Does anybody propose any other, in case it is
+    done at all by the nation?
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Not by the nation, but they are continually driving
+    us back to get it from, the States, State by State. That is the
+    point I want to make. We do not want you to drive us back to the
+    States. We want you men to take the question out of the hands of
+    the rabble of the State.
+
+    THE CHAIRMAN. May I interrupt you?
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Yes, sir; I wish you would.
+
+    THE CHAIRMAN. You have reflected on this subject a great deal. You
+    think there is a majority, as I understand, even in the State of
+    New York, against women suffrage?
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Yes, sir; overwhelmingly.
+
+    THE CHAIRMAN. How, then, would you get Legislatures elected to
+    ratify such a constitutional amendment?
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. That brings me exactly to the point.
+
+    THE CHAIRMAN. That is the point I wish to hear you upon.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Because the members of the State Legislatures are
+    intelligent men and can vote and enact laws embodying great
+    principles of the government without in any wise endangering their
+    positions with their constituencies. A constituency composed of
+    ignorant men would vote solid against us because they have never
+    thought on the question. Every man or woman who believes in the
+    enfranchisement of women is educated out of every idea that he or
+    she was born into. We were all born into the idea that the proper
+    sphere of women is subjection, and it takes education and thought
+    and culture to lift us out of it. Therefore when men go to the
+    ballot-box they till vote "no," unless they have actual argument
+    on it. I will illustrate. We have six Legislatures in the nation,
+    for instance, that have extended the right to vote on school
+    questions to the women, and not a single member of the State
+    Legislature has ever lost his office or forfeited the respect or
+    confidence of his constituents as a representative because he
+    voted to give women the right to vote on school questions. It is a
+    question that the unthinking masses never have thought upon. They
+    do not care about it one way or the other, only they have an
+    instinctive feeling that because women never did vote therefore it
+    is wrong that they ever should vote.
+
+    MRS. SPENCER. Do make the point that the Congress of the United
+    States leads the Legislatures of the States and educates them.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. When you, representative men, carry this matter to
+    Legislatures, State by State, they will ratify it. My point is
+    that you can safely do this. Senator Thurman, of Ohio, would
+    not lose a single vote in Ohio in voting in favor of the
+    enfranchisement of women. Senator EDMUNDS would not lose a single
+    Republican vote in the State of Vermont if he puts himself on our
+    side, which, I think, he will do. It is not a political question.
+    We are no political power that can make or break either party
+    to-day. Consequently each man is left independent to express his
+    own moral and intellectual convictions on the matter without
+    endangering himself politically.
+
+    SENATOR EDMUNDS. I think, Miss Anthony, you ought to put it
+    on rather higher, I will not say stronger, ground. If you can
+    convince us that it is right we would not stop to see how it
+    affected us politically.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. I was coming to that, I was going to say to all of
+    you men in office here to-day that if you can not go forward
+    and carry out either your Democratic or your Republican or your
+    Greenback theories, for instance, on the finance, there is no
+    great political power that is going to take you away from these
+    halls and prevent you from doing all those other things which you
+    want to do, and you can act out your own moral and intellectual
+    convictions on this without let or hindrance.
+
+    SENATOR EDMUNDS. Without any danger to the public interests, you
+    mean.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Without any danger to the public interests. I did
+    not mean to make a bad insinuation. Senator.
+
+    I want to give you another reason why we appeal to you. In these
+    three States where the question has been submitted and voted down
+    we can not get another Legislature to resubmit it, because they
+    say the people have expressed their opinion and decided no, and
+    therefore nobody with any political sense would resubmit the
+    question. It is therefore impossible in any one of those States.
+    We have tried hard in Kansas for ten years to get the question
+    resubmitted; the vote of that State seems to be taken as a
+    finality. We ask you to lift the sixteenth amendment out of the
+    arena of the public mass into the arena of thinking legislative
+    brains, the brains of the nation, under the law and the
+    Constitution. Not only do we ask it for that purpose, but when you
+    will have by a two-thirds vote submitted the proposition to the
+    several Legislatures, you have put the pin down and it never can
+    go back. No subsequent Congress can revoke that submission of the
+    proposition; there will be so much gained; it can not slide back.
+    Then we will go to New York or to Pennsylvania and urge upon the
+    Legislatures the ratification of that amendment. They may refuse;
+    they may vote it down the first time. Then we will go to the next
+    Legislature, and the next Legislature, and plead and plead, from
+    year to year, if it takes ten years. It is an open question to
+    every Legislature until we can get one that will ratify it, and
+    when that Legislature has once voted and ratified it no subsequent
+    legislation can revoke their ratification.
+
+    Thus, you perceive, Senators, that every step we would gain by
+    this sixteenth amendment process is fast and not to be done over
+    again. That is why I appeal to you especially. As I have shown you
+    in the respective States, if we fail to educate the people of
+    a whole State--and in Michigan it was only six months, and in
+    Colorado less than six months--the State Legislatures say that is
+    the end of it. I appeal to you, therefore, to adopt the course
+    that we suggest.
+
+    Gentlemen of the committee, if there is a question that you want
+    to ask me before I make my final appeal, I should like to have you
+    put it now; any question as to constitutional law or your right to
+    go forward. Of course you do not deny to us that this amendment
+    will be right in the line of all the amendments heretofore. The
+    eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth amendments
+    are all in line prohibiting the States from doing something which
+    they heretofore thought they had a right to do. Now we ask you to
+    prohibit the States from denying to women their rights.
+
+    I want to show you in closing that of the great acts of justice
+    done during the war and since the war the first one was a great
+    military necessity. We never got one inch of headway in putting
+    down the rebellion until the purpose of this great nation was
+    declared that slavery should he abolished. Then, as if by magic,
+    we went forward and put down the rebellion. At the close of the
+    rebellion the nation stood again at a perfect deadlock. The
+    Republican party was trembling in the balance, because it feared
+    that it could not hold its position, until it should have secured
+    by legislation to the Government what it had gained at the
+    point of the sword, and when the nation declared its purpose to
+    enfranchise the negro it was a political necessity. I do not want
+    to take too much vainglory out of the heads of Republicans, but
+    nevertheless it is a great national fact that neither of those
+    great acts of beneficence to the negro race was done because
+    of any high, overshadowing moral conviction on the part of any
+    considerable minority even of the people of this nation, but
+    simply because of a military necessity slavery was abolished,
+    and simply because of a political necessity black men were
+    enfranchised.
+
+    The blackest Republican State you had voted down negro suffrage,
+    and that was Kansas in 1867; Michigan voted it down in 1867; Ohio
+    voted it down in 1867. Iowa was the only State that ever voted
+    negro suffrage by a majority of the citizens to which the question
+    was submitted, and they had not more than seventy-five negroes
+    in the whole State; so it was not a very practical question.
+    Therefore, it may be fairly said, I think, that it was a military
+    necessity that compelled one of those acts of justice, and a
+    political necessity that compelled the other.
+
+    It seems to me that from the first word uttered by our dear
+    friend, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, of Indiana, all the way down, we
+    have been presenting to you the fact that there is a great moral
+    necessity pressing upon this nation to-day, that you shall
+    go forward and attach a sixteenth amendment to the Federal
+    Constitution which shall put in the hands of the women of this
+    nation the power to help make, shape, and control the social
+    conditions of society everywhere. I appeal to you from that
+    standpoint that you shall submit this proposition.
+
+    There is one other point to which I want to call your attention.
+    The Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator EDMUNDS chairman, reported
+    that the United States could do nothing to protect women in the
+    right to vote under the amendments. Now I want to give you a few
+    points where the United States interferes to take away the right
+    to vote from women where the State has given it to them. In
+    Wyoming, for instance, by a Democratic legislature, the women were
+    enfranchised. They were not only allowed to vote but to sit upon
+    juries, the same as men. Those of you who read the reports giving;
+    the results of that action have not forgotten that the first
+    result of women sitting upon juries was that wherever there was a
+    violation of the whisky law they brought in verdicts accordingly
+    for the execution of the law; and you will remember, too, that the
+    first man who ever had a verdict of guilty for murder in the first
+    degree in that Territory was tried by a jury made up largely of
+    women. Always up to that day every jury had brought in a verdict
+    of shot in self-defense, although the person shot down may have
+    been entirely unarmed. Then, in cities like Cheyenne and Laramie,
+    persons entered complaints against keepers of houses of ill-fame.
+
+    Women were on the jury, and the result was in every case that
+    before the juries could bring in a bill of indictment the women
+    had taken the train and left the town. Why do you hear no more
+    of women sitting on juries in that Territory? Simply because the
+    United States marshal, who is appointed by the President to go to
+    Wyoming, refuses to put the names of women into the box from which
+    the jury is drawn. There the United States Government interferes
+    to take the right away.
+
+    A DELEGATE. I should like to state that Governor Hoyt, of Wyoming,
+    who was the governor who signed the act giving to women this
+    right, informed me that the right had been restored, and that his
+    sister, who resides there, recently served on a jury.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. I am glad to hear it. It is two years since I was
+    there, but I was told that that was the case. In Utah the women
+    were given the right to vote, but a year and a half ago their
+    Legislative Assembly found that although they had the right to
+    vote the Territorial law provided that only male voters should
+    hold office. The Legislative Assembly of Utah passed a bill
+    providing that women should be eligible to all the offices of the
+    Territory. The school offices, superintendents of schools, were
+    the offices in particular to which the women wanted to be elected.
+    Governor Emory, appointed by the President of the United States,
+    vetoed that bill. Thus the full operations of enfranchisement
+    conferred by two of the Territories has been stopped by Federal
+    interference.
+
+    You ask why I come here instead of going to the State
+    Legislatures. You say that whenever the Legislatures extend the
+    right of suffrage to us by the constitutions of their States we
+    can get it. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado,
+    Kansas, Oregon, all these States, have had the school suffrage
+    extended by legislative enactment. If the question had been
+    submitted to the rank and file of the people of Boston, with
+    66,000 men paying nothing but the poll-tax, they would have
+    undoubtedly voted against letting women have the right to vote for
+    members of the school board; but their intelligent representatives
+    on the floor of the Legislature voted in favor of the extension of
+    the school suffrage to the women. The first result in Boston has
+    been the election of quite a number of women to the school board.
+    In Minnesota, in the little town of Rochester, the school board
+    declared its purpose to cut the women teachers' wages down. It
+    did not propose to touch the principal, who was a man, but they
+    proposed to cut all the women down from $50 to $35. One woman put
+    her bonnet on and went over the entire town and said, "We have got
+    a right to vote for this school board, and let us do so." They all
+    turned out and voted, and not a single $35 man was re-elected, but
+    all those who were in favor of paying $50.
+
+    It seems to be a sort of charity to let a woman teach school. You
+    say here that if a woman has a father, mother, or brother,
+    or anybody to support her, she can not have a place in the
+    Departments. In the city of Rochester they cannot let a married
+    woman teach school because she has got a husband, and it is
+    supposed he ought to support her. The women are working in the
+    Departments, as everywhere else, for half price, and the only
+    pretext, you tell us, for keeping women there is because the
+    Government can economize by employing women for less money. The
+    other day when I saw a newspaper item stating that the Government
+    proposed to compensate Miss Josephine Meeker for all her bravery,
+    heroism, and terrible sufferings by giving her a place in the
+    Interior Department, it made my blood boil to the ends of my
+    fingers and toes. To give that girl a chance to work in the
+    Department; to do just as much work as a man, and pay her half as
+    much, was a charity. That was a beneficence on the part of this
+    grand Government to her. We want the ballot for bread. When we do
+    equal work we want equal wages.
+
+    MRS. SAXON. California, in her recent convention, prohibits the
+    Legislature hereafter from enacting any law for woman's suffrage,
+    does it not?
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. I do not know. I have not seen the new constitution.
+
+    MRS. SAXON. It does. The convention inserted a provision in the
+    constitution that the Legislature could not act upon the subject
+    at all.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. Everywhere that we have gone, Senators, to ask our
+    right at the hands of any legislative or political body, we have
+    been the subjects of ridicule. For instance, I went before the
+    great national Democratic convention in New York, in 1868, as a
+    delegate from the New York Woman Suffrage Association, to ask that
+    great party, now that it wanted to come to the front again, to put
+    a genuine Jeffersonian plank in its platform, pledging the ballot
+    to all citizens, women as well as men, should it come into power.
+    You may remember how Mr. Seymour ordered my petition to be read,
+    after looking at it in the most scrutinizing manner, when it was
+    referred to the committee on resolutions, where it has slept the
+    sleep of death from that day to this. But before the close of
+    the convention a body of ignorant workingmen sent in a petition
+    clamoring for greenbacks, and you remember that the Democratic
+    party bought those men by putting a solid greenback plank in the
+    platform.
+
+    Everybody supposed they would nominate Pendleton, or some other
+    man of pronounced views, but instead of doing that they nominated
+    Horatio Seymour, who stood on the fence, politically speaking. My
+    friends, Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and women who have brains
+    and education, women who are tax-payers, went there and petitioned
+    for the practical application of the fundamental principles of
+    our Government to one-half of the people. Those most ignorant
+    workingmen, the vast mass of them foreigners, went there,
+    and petitioned that that great political party should favor
+    greenbacks. Why did they treat those workingmen with respect, and
+    put a greenback plank in their platform, and only table us, and
+    ignore us? Simply because the workingmen represented the power of
+    the ballot. They could make or unmake the great Democratic party
+    at that election. The women were powerless. We could be ridiculed
+    and ignored with impunity, and so we were laughed at, and put on
+    the table.
+
+    Then the Republicans went to Chicago, and they did just the same
+    thing. They said the Government bonds must be paid in precisely
+    the currency specified by the Congressional enactment, and
+    Talleyrand himself could not have devised how not to say anything
+    better than the Republicans did at Chicago on that question. Then
+    they nominated a man who had not any financial opinions whatever,
+    and who was not known, except for his military record, and they
+    went into the campaign. Both those parties had this petition from
+    us.
+
+    I met a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., a short time ago. She came
+    to me one morning and told me about the obscene shows licensed
+    in that city, and said that she thought of memorializing the
+    Legislature. I said, "Do; you can not do anything else; you are
+    helpless, but you can petition. Of course they will laugh at you."
+    Notwithstanding, I drew up a petition and she circulated it.
+    Twelve hundred of the best citizens signed that petition, and the
+    lady carried it to the Legislature, just as Mrs. Wallace took her
+    petition in the Indiana Legislature. They read it, laughed at it,
+    and laid it on the table; and at the close of the session, by
+    a unanimous vote, they retired in a solid body to witness the
+    obscene show themselves. After witnessing it, they not only
+    allowed the license to continue for that year, but they have
+    licensed it every year from that day to this, against all the
+    protests of the petitioners. [Laughter.]
+
+    SENATOR EDMUNDS. Do not think we are wanting in respect to you and
+    the ladies here because you say something that makes us laugh.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. You are not laughing at me; you are treating me
+    respectfully, because you are hearing my argument; you are not
+    asleep, not one of you, and I am delighted.
+
+    Now, I am going to tell you one other fact. Seven thousand of the
+    best citizens of Illinois petitioned the Legislature of 1877 to
+    give them the poor privilege of voting on the license question. A
+    gentleman presented their petition; the ladies were in the lobbies
+    around the room. A gentleman made a motion that the president of
+    the State association of the Christian Temperance Union be
+    allowed to address the Legislature regarding the petition of the
+    memorialists, when a gentleman sprang to his feet, and said it was
+    well enough for the honorable gentleman to present the petition,
+    and have it received and laid on the table, but "for a gentleman
+    to rise in his seat and propose that the valuable time of the
+    honorable gentlemen of the Illinois Legislature should be consumed
+    in discussing the nonsense of those women is going a little too
+    far. I move that the sergeant-at-arms be ordered to clear the hall
+    of the house of representatives of the mob;" referring to those
+    Christian women. Now, they had had the lobbyists of the whisky
+    ring in that Legislature for years and years, not only around it
+    at respectful distances, but inside the bar, and nobody ever made
+    a motion to clear the halls of the whisky mob there. It only takes
+    Christian women to make a mob.
+
+    MRS. SAXON. We were treated extremely respectfully in Louisiana.
+    It showed plainly the temper of the convention when the present
+    governor admitted that woman suffrage was a fact bound to come.
+    They gave us the privilege of having women on the school boards,
+    but then the officers are appointed by men who are politicians.
+
+    MISS ANTHONY. I want to read a few words that come from good
+    authority, for black men at least. I find here a little extract
+    that I copied years ago from the Anti-Slavery Standard of 1870. As
+    you know, Wendell Phillips was the editor of that paper at that
+    time:
+
+    "A man with the ballot in his hand is the master of the situation.
+    He defines all his other rights; what is not already given him he
+    takes."
+
+    That is exactly what we want, Senators. The rights you have not
+    already given us; we want to get in such a position that we can
+    take them.
+
+    "The ballot makes every class sovereign over its own fate.
+    Corruption may steal from a man his independence; capital may
+    starve, and intrigue fetter him, at times; but against all these,
+    his vote, intelligently and honestly cast, is, in the long run,
+    his full protection. If, in the struggle, his fort surrenders,
+    it is only because it is betrayed from within. No power ever
+    permanently wronged a voting class without its own consent."
+
+    Senators, I want to ask of you that you will, by the law and
+    parliamentary rules of your committee, allow us to agitate this
+    question by publishing this report and the report which you shall
+    make upon our petitions, as I hope you will make a report. If your
+    committee is so pressed with business that it can not possibly
+    consider and report upon this question, I wish some of you would
+    make a motion on the floor of the Senate that a special committee
+    be appointed to take the whole question of the enfranchisement
+    of women into consideration, and that that committee shall have
+    nothing else to do. This off-year of politics, when there is
+    nothing to do but to try how not to do it (politically, I mean,
+    I am not speaking personally), is the best time you can have to
+    consider the question of woman suffrage, and I ask you to use your
+    influence with the Senate to have it specially attended to this
+    year. Do not make us come here thirty years longer. It is twelve
+    years since the first time I came before a Senate committee. I
+    said then to Charles Sumner, if I could make the honorable Senator
+    from Massachusetts believe that I feel the degradation and the
+    humiliation of disfranchisement precisely as he would if his
+    fellows had adjudged him incompetent from any cause whatever from
+    having his opinion counted at the ballot-box we should have our
+    right to vote in the twinkling of an eye.
+
+
+
+    REMARKS BY MRS. SARA A. SPENCER, OF WASHINGTON.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. Congress printed 10,000 copies of its proceedings
+    concerning the memorial services of a dead man, Professor Henry.
+    It cost me three months of hard work to have 3,000 copies of
+    our arguments last year before the Committee on Privileges and
+    Elections printed for 10,000,000 living women. I ask that the
+    committee will have printed 10,000 copies of this report.
+
+    The CHAIRMAN. The committee have no power to order the printing.
+    That can only be done by the order of the Senate. A resolution
+    can be offered to that effect in the Senate. I have only to say,
+    ladies, that you will admit that we have listened to you with
+    great attention, and I can certainly say with very great interest.
+    What you have said will be duly and earnestly considered by the
+    committee.
+
+    Mrs. WALLACE. I wish to make just one remark in reference to what
+    Senator Thurman said as to the popular vote being against woman
+    suffrage. The popular vote is against it, but not the popular
+    voice. Owing to the temperance agitation in the last six years the
+    growth of the suffrage sentiment among the wives and mothers of
+    this nation has largely increased.
+
+    Mrs. SPENCER. In behalf of the women of the United States, permit
+    me to thank the Senate Judiciary Committee for their respectful,
+    courteous, and close attention.
+
+Mr. HOAR. Mr. President, I do not propose to make a speech at this
+late hour of the day; it would be cruel to the Senate; and I had not
+expected that this measure would be here this afternoon. I was absent
+on a public duty and came in just at the close of the speech of my
+honorable friend from Missouri [Mr. VEST]. I wish, however, to say one
+word in regard to what seemed to be the burden of his speech.
+
+He says that the women who ask this change in our political
+organization are not simply seeking to be put upon school boards and
+upon boards of health and charity and upon all the large number of
+duties of a political nature for which he must confess they are fit,
+but he says they will want to be President of the United States, and
+want to be Senators, and want to be marshals and sheriffs, and that
+seems to him supremely ridiculous. Now I do not understand that that
+is the proposition. What they want to do and to be is to be eligible
+to such public duty as a majority of their fellow-citizens may think
+they are fitted for. The majority of public duties in this country do
+not require robust, physical health, or exposure to what is base or
+unhealthy; and when those duties are imposed upon anybody they will be
+imposed only upon such persons as are fit for them. But they want
+that if the majority of the American people think a woman like Queen
+Victoria, or Queen Elizabeth, or Queen Isabella of Spain, or Maria
+Theresa of Hungary (the four most brilliant sovereigns of any sex in
+modern history with only two or three exceptions), the fittest person
+to be President of the United States, they may be permitted to
+exercise their choice accordingly.
+
+Old men are eligible to office, old men are allowed to vote, but we do
+not send old men to war, or make constables or watchmen or overseers
+of State prisons of old men; and it is utterly idle to suppose that
+the fitness to vote or the fitness to hold office has anything to do
+with the physical strength or with the particular mental qualities in
+regard to which the sexes differ from each other.
+
+Mr. President, my honorable friend spoke of the French revolution and
+the horrors in which the women of Paris took part, and from that he
+would argue that American wives and mothers and sisters are not fit
+for the calm and temperate management of our American republican
+life. His argument would require him by the same logic to agree that
+republicanism itself is not fit for human society. The argument is the
+argument against popular government whether by man or woman, and the
+Senator only applies to this new phase of the claim of equal rights
+what his predecessors would argue against the rights we now have
+applied to us.
+
+But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that a woman with
+her sentiment and emotional nature and liability to be moved by
+passion and feeling should hold the office of Senator. Why, Mr.
+President, the Senator's own speech is a refutation of its own
+argument. Everybody knows that my honorable friend from Missouri is
+one of the most brilliant men in this country. He is a logician, he is
+an orator, he is a man of large experience, he is a lawyer entrusted
+with large interests; yet when he was called upon to put forth this
+great effort of his this afternoon and to argue this question which he
+thinks so clear, what did he do? He furnished the gush and the emotion
+and the eloquence, but when he came to any argument he had to call
+upon two women, Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney to supply all that.
+[Laughter.] If Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney have to make the argument
+in the Senate of the United States for the brilliant and distinguished
+Senator from Missouri it does not seem to me so absolutely ridiculous
+that they should have or that women like them should have seats here
+to make arguments of their own. [Manifestations of applause in the
+galleries.]
+
+The joint resolution was reported to the Senate without amendment.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. If no amendment be proposed the question is,
+shall the joint resolution be engrossed for a third reading?
+
+Mr. COCKRELL. Let us have the yeas and nays.
+
+Mr. BLAIR. Why not take the yeas and nays on the passage?
+
+Mr. COCKRELL. Very well.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. The call is withdrawn.
+
+The joint resolution was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading,
+and was read the third time.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. Shall the joint resolution pass?
+
+Mr. COCKRELL. I call for the yeas and nays.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. Upon this question the yeas and nays will
+necessarily be taken.
+
+The Secretary proceeded to call the roll.
+
+Mr. CHACE (when his name was called). I am paired with the Senator
+from North Carolina [Mr. RANSOM]. If he were present I should vote
+"yea."
+
+Mr. DAWES (when his name was called). I am paired with the Senator
+from Texas [Mr. MAXEY]. I regret that I am not able to vote on this
+question. I should vote "yea" if he were here.
+
+Mr. COKE. My colleague [Mr. MAXEY], if present, would vote "nay."
+
+Mr. GRAY (when Mr. GORMAN'S name was called). I am requested by the
+Senator from Maryland [Mr. GORMAN] to say that he is paired with the
+Senator from Maine [Mr. FRYE].
+
+Mr. STANFORD (when his name was called). I am paired with the Senator
+from West Virginia [Mr. CAMDEN]. If he were present I should vote
+"yea."
+
+The roll-call was concluded.
+
+Mr. HARRIS. I have a general pair with the Senator from Vermont [Mr.
+EDMUNDS], who is necessarily absent from the Chamber, but I see his
+colleague voted "nay," and as I am opposed to the resolution I will
+record my vote "nay."
+
+Mr. KENNA. I am paired on all questions with the Senator from New York
+[Mr. MILLER].
+
+Mr. JONES, of Arkansas. I have a general pair with the Senator from
+Indiana [Mr. HARRISON]. If he were present I should vote "nay" on this
+question.
+
+Mr. BROWN. I was requested by the Senator from South Carolina [Mr.
+BUTLER] to announce his pair with the Senator from Pennsylvania [Mr.
+CAMERON], and to say that if the Senator from South Carolina were
+present he would vote "nay." I do not know how the Senator from
+Pennsylvania would vote.
+
+Mr. CULLOM. I was requested by the Senator from Maine [Mr. FRYE] to
+announce his pair with the Senator from Maryland [Mr. GORMAN].
+
+The result was announced--yeas 16, nays 34; as follows:
+
+YEAS--16.
+
+Blair,
+Bowen,
+Cheney,
+Conger,
+Cullom,
+Dolph,
+Farwell,
+Hoar,
+Manderson,
+Mitchell of Oreg.,
+Mitchell of Pa.,
+Palmer,
+Platt,
+Sherman,
+Teller,
+Wilson of Iowa.
+
+NAYS--34.
+
+Beck,
+Berry,
+Blackburn,
+Brown,
+Call,
+Cockrell,
+Coke,
+Colquitt,
+Eustis,
+Evarts,
+George,
+Gray,
+Hampton,
+Harris,
+Hawley,
+Ingalls,
+Jones of Nevada,
+McMillan,
+McPherson,
+Mahone,
+Morgan,
+Morrill,
+Payne,
+Pugh,
+Saulsbury,
+Sawyer,
+Sewell,
+Spooner,
+Vance,
+Vest,
+Walthall,
+Whitthorne,
+Williams,
+Wilson of Md.
+
+ABSENT--26
+
+Aldrich,
+Allison,
+Butler,
+Camden,
+Cameron,
+Chace,
+Dawes,
+Edmunds,
+Fair,
+Frye,
+Gibson,
+Gorman,
+Hale,
+Harrison,
+Jones of Arkansas,
+Jones of Florida,
+Kenna,
+Maxey,
+Miller,
+Plumb,
+Ransom,
+Riddleberger,
+Sabin,
+Stanford,
+Van Wyck,
+Voorhees.
+
+The PRESIDING OFFICER. Two-thirds have not voted for the resolution.
+It is not passed.
+
+Mr. PLUMB subsequently said: I wish to state that I was unexpectedly
+called out of the Senate just before the vote was taken on the
+constitutional amendment, and to also state that if I had been here I
+should have voted for it.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate
+Of The United States, 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887, by Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11114 ***