II [?] HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE, UNITED STATES SENATE, APRIL 2, 1888. Individual Sovereignty WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 1888. WOMAN SUFFRAGE. MONDAY, April 2, 1888 - 10 o'clock a. m. The committee met to hear arguments in behalf of woman suffrage from the delegates to the International Woman's Council. [Present, Senators Cockrell, (chairman), [Brown?, Blair, R????, Chase, and Bowen.] STATEMENT OF MRS. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. Mrs. STANTON. Honorable gentlemen, for many successive years a class of women, fully comprehending the dignity of citizenship in a Republic, have appeared before committees of the House and the Senate, praying that the national Constitution should be so interpreted or amended as to secure to the women of the nation all the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens. During this discussion the basic principles of republican government, the Declaration of Independence, the national Constitution, have been thoroughly studied by us, until it may be truly said that the leaders in the suffrage movement fully understand the Constitution, and that to them its provisions for the largest liberty are as familiar as the spelling book. Their arguments already gild the page of history and are highly creditable, for their research and eloquence, to the women of this generation. Our champions, too, in the halls of Congress and legislative assemblies in half the States of the Union have based their arguments on these immortal documents, which together form the Magna Charta of human liberties. Logical arguments against woman's enfranchisement can not be based on the principles of our Government, for they all alike proclaim "equal rights to all" without regard to race, color, sex, or previous conditions of servitude. Individual sovereignty, individual conscience and judgment, are the central truths of a republic, from which radiate the guiding principles that lighten our path through all the complications of government. The Constitution as it is, in spirit and letter, is broad enough to protect the personal and property rights of all citizens under our flag. By every principle of fair interpretation we need no amendment, no new definitions of the terms "people," "persons," "citizens," no additional power conferred on Congress to enable this body to establish a republican form of government in every State of the Union; and whenever our rulers are ready to make the experiment they will see that they already possess all the constitutional power they need to act, and that the right of suffrage is, and always was, the inalienable right of every citizen under government. [*Words - 4321 -*] 3 4 WOMAN SUFFRAGE. Let me rehearse a few of the provisions of the Constitution to show your power and our rights as citizens of a republic: We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Article I, section 2: The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States, and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature. Section 4: The times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators. (See Elliot's Debates, vol. 3, p. 366 - remarks of Mr. Madison - Story's Commentaries, secs. 623, 626, 578.) Section 8. The Congress shall have power - To establish a uniform mode of naturalization, to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof. Section 9. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed. No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States. No State shall pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligations of contracts, or grant any title of nobility. (See Cummings vs. The State of Missouri, Wallace Rep., 287, and ex parte Garland, same volume.) Article IV, section 2: The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States. The elective franchise is one of the privileges secured by this section. (See Corfield vs. Coryell, 4 Washington Circuit Court Reps., 380, cited and approved in Durham vs. Lamphere, 3 Gray; Mass. Rep., 276, and Bennett vs. Boggs, Baldwin Rep., p. 72, Circuit Court U. S.) Section 4: The United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government. How can that form of government be republican when one-half the people are forever deprived of all participation in its affairs? Article VI: This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding. XIV amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the United States. Even the preamble of the Constitution is an argument for self-government - "We, the people." You recognize women as people, for you count us in the basis of representation. Half our Congresswomen hold their seats to-day as representatives of women. We help to swell the figures by WOMAN SUFFRAGE 5 which you are here, and too many of you, alas! are only figurative representatives, paying little heed to our rights as citizens. "No bill of attainder shall be passed." "No title of nobility granted." So says the Constitution; and yet you have passed bills of attainder in every State of the Union making sex a disqualification for citizenship. You have granted titles of nobility to every male voter, making all men rulers, governors, sovereigns, over all women. "The United States shall guaranty to every State in the Union a republican form of government." And yet we have not a republican form of government in a single State in the Union. One-half the people have never consented to a single law under which they live. They have had rulers placed over them in whom they have no choice. They are taxed without representation, tried in our courts by men, for the violation of laws made by men, with no appeal except to men, and for crimes over which men should have no jurisdiction whatever, while honorable gentlemen all - these, and many more provisions of the Constitution are violated every day that woman remains disenfranchised. You are very conscientious in not using the power you already possess to crown us with all the rights of citizens. There is no significance in the argument that the fathers did not intend to include women in these provisions. The contrary supposition is quite as fair as in spirit, and, better, they have done so. "We, the people" are three plain English words that do not admit of any subtle, symbolical meaning, and when you count us in the basis of representation, as I said, you admit that we are people. Again, as women voted all along from the earliest days in England, and many voted and held important offices in colonial days in our country, the fact must have been familiar to the fathers. Article 4, section 2, says the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States. Yet, if citizens from Washington Territory, Wyoming, or Kansas, where women vote, pass into any other State or Territory they lose the right to vote, the fundamental right of citizenship. We have abundant guaranties in the Constitution to secure to woman all her rights. All we need is that some far-seeing statesman or chief justice may arise who shall fairly interpret the constitutional law we already possess; a man who, like Lord Mansfield in the Somerset case, shall declare that, according to the genius of our institutions, no disenfranchised citizen can breathe on American soil. That simple declaration of Lord Mansfield struck every fetter from the slaves in every land and isle of the sea under the shadow of the English throne. The chief justice of Massachusetts abolished slavery in that State by a similar declaration. The fact that the pronoun "he" is used in various provisions of the Constitution does not decide that man alone is referred to, for in the whole criminal code the pronouns are "he,", "his," and "him." Surely if women can be made to pay all the penalties of violated law as "he," she might be permitted to enjoy all the privileges of a citizen as "he." If a woman can hang as "he," she might vote as "he." I would quote a few opinions of distinguished statesmen and publicists, to show what our ablest men think as to where the principles of our Government legitimately lead us in deciding the inalienable rights of citizens. The Declaration of Independence asserts that to secure the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among men, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." 6 WOMAN SUFFRAGE. Benjamin Franklin said: Liberty consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who frame the laws and who are the guardians of every man's life, property, and peace. That they who have no voice not vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and to their representatives. James Madison said: Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them. Samuel Adams said: Representation and legislation, as well as taxation, are inseparable, according to the spirit of our Constitution and of all others that are free. Again, he said: No man can be justly taxed by, or bound in conscience to obey, any law to which he has not given his consent in person or by his representative. And again: No man can take another's property from him without his consent. This is the law of nature, and a violation of it is the same thing whether it is done by one man, who is called a king, or by five hundred of another denomination. James Otis, in speaking of the rights of the colonists as descendants of Englishmen, said they "were not to be cheated out of them by any phantom of virtual representation, or any other fiction of law or politics." Again: No such phrase as virtual representation is known in law or constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd. Among all the rights and privileges appertaining unto us, that of having a share in the legislation, and being governed by such laws as we ourselves shall cause, is the most fundamental and essential as well as the most advantageous and beneficial. The judicious Hooker wrote: Agreeable to the same just privileges of natural equity is that maxim of the English constitution, that "law, to bind all, must be assented to by all," and there can be no legal appearance of assent without some degree of representation. In 1790, Condorcet, in his treatise on the admission of women to the rights of citizenship in France, says: Now, the rights of men result solely from the fact that they are rational beings, susceptible of acquiring moral ideas and reasoning on those ideas. Women, having the same qualities, have the same equal rights. Either no one individual of the human kind has true rights or all have the same, and one who votes against the right of another, whatever be that other's religion, color, or sex, from that moment forfeits his own. Mirabeau condenses the whole question in his definition that "a representative body should be a miniature of the whole community." The right of women to personal representation through the ballot seems to me unassailable wherever the right of man is conceded and exercised. I can conceive of no possible abstract justification for the exclusion of the one and the inclusion of the other. For years we demanded our rights under the Constitution as it is, specifically under the fourteenth amendment. Some of our coadjutors tested its legality by exercising the right of suffrage in their respective States. Their cases were tried in the Supreme Court and decided against them, thus practically declaring that under neither State nor national constitutions is there any guaranty for the protection of the political rights of women, and their civil rights have also been denied WOMEN SUFFRAGE 7 by both the State and General Governments. A women in the State of Illinois was denied the right to practice law, and the Supreme Court of the United States, to which she carried her case, confirmed the State's decision. Since these decisions we have asked for a sixteenth amendment, declaring that all the provisions of the Constitution shall apply equally to men and women. Although we have had these hearings eighteen years in succession, and all the minority reports of our champions, from General Butler, of Massachusetts, down to Senator Blair, of New Hampshire, have been able, unanswerable constitutional arguments, the majority reports have studiously avoided logic, common sense and Constitution, and based their objections upon the most trivial popular prejudices. Lecky, the historian, has well said the success of a movement depends much less on the force of its arguments, or upon the ability of its advocates, than the predisposition of society to receive it. Though our arguments have never been answered, it is fair to suppose that the honorable gentlemen who have written the adverse reports have read the Constitution which they have sworn to support, and are fully aware that the weight of argument rests on our side. Hence they betake themselves to the world of speculation, where they can manufacture statistics adapted to their prejudices. As our arguments are never answered, it is evident they make no impression on our opponents, as each committee in turn rehearses the popular objections, though we have pointed out their absurdity as often as they are offered. Instead of a constitutional argument at this time I will review a few of the points made by former majority committees, suggesting that the gentlemen to report on this hearing will try to strike out some new and more worthy trend of thought. It may not be known to you gentlemen that all these reports are published in the History of Woman Suffrage and that these volumes have been not only extensively circulated in this country and placed in all our leading public libraries, but that they are also circulated in foreign lands and placed in all the old universities in Great Britain and Europe. However indifferent our statesmen may be to their own reputation, their wives and daughters do not wish them to make fools of themselves on the page of history. I never glance over these reports that I do not blush for my countrymen. My only consolation is that the able and eloquent minority reports do in a measure redeem the dignity of these committees in both the Senate and the House. In view of such men, the humiliation I feel, as a native-born American citizen, that after half a century of weary waiting and watching, educated, refined women are still compelled to beg of their own Saxon fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, for those civil and political rights so freely granted to every foreigner who lands on our shores. While I possess every qualification of a voter - age, property, education; while I fully appreciate the genius of republican institutions, and glory in the success if our triumphant democracy; while traveling in the Old World my proudest boast has ever been "I am an American citizen;" yet to my pleadings for the political rights of women you turn a deaf ear, and hold the very idea of women's enfranchisement up to scorn, while you extend the right hand of welcome to every ignorant foreigner who lands on our shores, who has no idea of what constitutes a republic, nor of the duties self-government invokes; yet you crown 8 WOMAN SUFFRAGE. him with the rights of American citizenship, rights for which your own mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters plead in vain. Landing in New York one week ago, I saw 400 steerage passengers leave the vessel. Dull-eyed, heavy-visaged, stopping with huge burdens and the oppressions they endured in the Old World, they stood in painful contrast with the group of brilliant women on their way to the International Council just held here in Washington. I thought, as this long line passed by, of the speedy transformation the genial influences of equality would effect in the appearance of these men, of the new dignity they would acquire, with a voice in the laws under which they live, and I rejoiced for them; but bitter reflections filled my mind when I thought these men are the future rulers of our daughters; these will interpret the civil and criminal codes by which they will be governed these will be our future judges and jurors to try young girls in our courts for the crime of infanticide, for trial by a jury of her peers has never yet in the history of the world been vouchsafed to woman. Here is a right so ancient that it is difficult to trace its origin in history, a right so sacred that the humblest criminal may choose his juror. But, alas for the daughters of the people, their judges, advocates, jurors, must be men, and for them there is no appeal. But his is only one wrong among many inevitable in a disfranchised class. It is impossible for you, gentlemen, to appreciate the humiliations women suffer at every turn. My joy in reaching my native land and meeting dear friends and family once more was shadowed by that vision on the wharf and by the knowledge that by the thousands still they come, and from lands where woman, as a mere beast of burden, is infinitely more degraded than by any possibility she can be here. Do you wonder, in view of what the character of our future law-makers may be, that we are filled with apprehensions of coming evil, and that we feel there is no time to be lost, if our Saxon fathers ever propose to throw around us the protecting power of law and Constitution? The next generation of women will not argue with their rulers as patiently as we have done, and to so little purpose for half a century. You have now the power to settle this question by moral influences, by wise legislation. But, if you can not be aroused to its serious consideration, like every other step in progress, it will eventually be settled by violence. The wild enthusiasm of women can be used for evil as well as good. To-day, you have the power to guide and direct it into channels of true patriotism, but in future, with all the elements of discontent now gathering from foreign lands, you will have the scenes of the French Commune repeated in our land. What women, exasperated with a sense of injustice, have done, in dire extremities in the nations of the Old World, they will do here. The justice and moderation of our demands have always seemed to me so apparent that the bare statement should have sufficed long ago. The protracted struggle through which we have passed, and our labors not yet crowned with success, seems to me sometimes like a painful dream in which one strives to run and yet stands still, incapable alike of escaping or meeting the impending danger. I would not pain your ears with a rehearsal of the hopes ofttimes deferred and shadowed with fear, of the brightest anticipations again and again disappointed. I will leave it to your imagination to picture to yourselves how you would feel if you had had a case in court, a bill before some legislative body, or a political aspiration, for nearly half a century, with a continual succession of adverse decisions, while law and common justice were wholly on your side. Such, honorable gentlemen, is our case. WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 9 Every point of constitutional law has been argued over and over, not only by our coadjutors, but by some of the ablest men in the nation. These arguments still remain unanswered. It is fair to suppose that, understanding the provisions of the Constitution, you know that women being persons born and naturalized in this country are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside, and that they have the same inalienable right to life, liberty, and happiness, to self-government and self-protection that each of you possess. Like you, women pay taxes and the penalty of their own crimes. If they commit theft or murder they are imprisoned and hung. If compelled to represent themselves on the gallows, why not at the polls? Surely the latter duty could be much more gracefully discharged than the former. In looking over the majority reports I find the chief subterfuge of some of our opponents is that woman would be a dangerous element in politics. First. They fear the vicious women, as it is supposed that they would rally a mighty multitude and all go to the polls, drive all the virtuous women away, completely demoralize the men, and sap the foundations of party platforms and political life. The women of the French revolution are supposed to illustrate what this class would do. Second. They fear the fashionable women, because they would vote for handsome men, make their parlors symposiums for the discussion of questions of political economy, sacrifice their country to personal ambition and family aggrandizement, and spend so much time in the galleries of legislative assemblies as to distract the attention of statesmen from the great work of government. Third. They fear religious, devout women, because they would destroy the secular nature of our Government by introducing the name of God into the Constitution, and establishing religious tests for political parties and platforms. Fourth. They fear married women, because they would vote with their husbands, and thus merely double the vote, or they would vote directly opposite, and thus destroy the family relation, which in either view would be a public and social calamity. Fifth. The colored women. After wasting reams of paper and an immense amount of brain force in drawing up the fourteenth amendment expressly to keep this class out of the body politic, it would be most aggravating, after twenty years of safety, to find them citizens of the United States under this very amendment. Though I believe in universal suffrage, yet I am willing you should begin the experiment of womanhood suffrage with the smallest minority you deem safe, so that by enfranchising some women you overturn the present aristocracy of sex. Well, gentlemen, to make the first practical step for you as easy as possible, why not exclude these five classes for the present and begin your experiment "with spinsters and widows" who are householders. This is the basis on which England extends municipal suffrage to women. You have the power to extend and withhold the suffrage, as you choose; there is no reason why you should begin with universal suffrage for women. We can not ask you to be more generous to us than you have been to your own sex. Men at one time voted on qualifications of property, education, color, but each in turn were abolished in some States, and in some States still remain, except color, which was abolished for men by the fourteenth amendment. 10 WOMAN SUFFRAGE. Though my coadjutors all believe in universal suffrage, yet I think we should be willing to let you start with spinsters and widows who are householders. Having homes of their own it is fair to suppose that they are industrious, common-sense women, neither vicious, fashionable, nor ambitious for family position, women who love their country (having no husbands to love) better than themselves. With this class, you escape all danger of family upheavals on the one side and doubling the vote on the other. In this way, by admitting some women into political life, we overturn the aristocracy of sex. Do you realize, gentlemen, that in establishing manhood suffrage you made all men sovereigns and all women subjects? This, the most odious form of aristocracy that the world ever saw, is the only one we have; an aristocracy that makes all men, black and white, foreign and native, lettered and unlettered, washed and unwashed, virtuous and vicious, the rulers of refined, educated, native-born women; an aristocracy that destroys the happiness of social life, exalting the son above the mother who bore him, engendering an insidious contempt for women among all classes expressed in the debates on this question at every fireside, in the halls of legislation, in our laws and literature, alike in poetry and prose, most depressing to sensitive women, insulting to those who have a proper self-respect, and like exasperating to all. In the history of the race there has been no struggle for liberty like this. Whenever the interest of the ruling classes has induced them to confer new rights on a subject class it has been done with no effort on the part of latter. Neither the American slave nor the English laborer demanded the right of suffrage. It was given in both cases to strengthen the liberal party. The philanthropy of the few may have entered into those reforms, but political expediency carried both measures. Women, on the contrary, have fought their own battles; and in their rebellion against existing conditions have inaugurated the most fundamental revolution the world has ever witnessed. The magnitude and multiplicity of the changes involved make the obstacles in the way of success seem almost insurmountable. The narrow self-interest of all classes is opposed to the sovereignty of woman. The rulers in the state are not willing to share their power with a class equal, if not superior, to themselves, over which they could never hope for absolute control, and whose methods of government might in many respects differ from their own. The anointed leaders in the church are equally hostile to freedom for a sex supposed for wise purposes to have been subordinated by divine decree. The capitalist in the world of work holds the key to the trades and professions and undermines the power of labor unions in their struggles for shorter hours and fairer wages by substituting the cheap labor of a disenfranchised class that can not organize its forces, thus making wife and sister rivals of husband and brother in the industries, to the detriment of both classes. Of the autocrat in the home, John Stuart Mill has well said: No ordinary man is willing to find at his own fireside an equal in the person he calls wife. This society is based on this fourfold bondage of woman, making liberty and equality for her antagonistic to every organized institution. Where, then, can we rest the lever with which to life one-half of humanity from these depths of degradation, but on "that columbiad of our political life - the ballot - which makes every citizen who holds it a full- armed monitor?" [Applause.] [*163*] 80 History of Woman Suffrage. [the nation? And now, yielding to none in intense love of womanhood; standing here beneath the very dome of the national capitol overshadowed by the old flag; with the blood of the revolutionary patriots coursing through my veins; as a native-born, tax-paying American citizen, I ask equality before the law.] ELIZABETH CADY STANTON said: Gentlemen of the Committee: In appearing before you to ask for a sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, permit me to say that with the Hon. Charles Sumner, we believe that our constitution, fairly interpreted, already secures to the humblest individual all the rights, privileges and immunities of American citizens. But as statesmen differ in their interpretations of constitutional law as widely as they differ in their organizations, the rights of every class of citizens must be clearly defined in concise, unmistakable language. All the great principles of liberty declared by the fathers gave no protection to the black man of the republic for a century, and when, with higher light and knowledge his emancipation and enfranchisement were proclaimed, it was said that the great truths set forth in the prolonged debates of thirty years on the individual rights of the black man, culminating in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution, had no significance for woman. Hence we ask that this anomalous class of beings, not recognized by the supreme powers as either "persons" or "citizens" may be defined and their rights declared in the constitution. In the adjustment of the question of suffrage now before the people of this country for settlement, it is of the highest importance that the organic law of the land should be so framed and construed as to work injustice to none, but secure as far as possible perfect political equality among all classes of citizens. In determining your right and power to legislate on this question, consider what has been done already. As the national constitution declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside," it is evident: First - That the immunities and privileges of American citizenship, however defined, are national in character, and paramount to all State authority. Second - That while the constitution leaves the qualification of electors to the several States, it nowhere gives them the right to deprive any citizen of the elective franchise; the State may regulate but not abolish the right of suffrage for any class. Third - As the Constitution of the United States expressly declares that no State shall make or enforce any law that shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, those provisions of the several States constitutions that exclude citizens from the franchise on account of sex, alike violate the spirit and letter of the Federal constitution. Fourth - As the question of naturalization is so expressly withheld from the States, and as the States would clearly have no right to deprive of the franchise naturalized citizens, among whom women are expressly included, still more clearly have they no right to deprive native-born women-citizens of the right. Let me give you a few extracts from the national constitution upon which these propositions are based: Mrs. Harbert at Hearing, 1878. 79 State is but the larger family, the nation the old homestead, and that in this national home there is a room and a corner and a duty for "mother." A duty recognized by such a statesman as John Adams, who wrote to his wife in regard to her mother: Your mother had a clear and penetrated understanding and a profound judgment, as well as an honest, a friendly and charitable heart. There is one thing, however, which you will forgive me if I hint to you. Let me ask you rather if you are not of my opinion. Were not her talents and virtues too much confined to private, social and domestic life? My opinion of the duties of religion and morality comprehends a very extensive connection with society at large and the great interests of the public. Does not natural morality and, much more, Christian benevolence make it our indispensable duty to endeavor to serve our fellow-creatures to the utmost of our power in promoting and supporting those great political systems and general regulations upon which the happiness of multitudes depends? The benevolence, charity, capacity and industry which exerted in private life would make a family, a parish or a town happy, employed upon a larger scale and in support of the great principles of virtue and freedom of political regulations, might secure whole nations and generations from misery, want and contempt. Intense domestic life is selfish. The home evidently needs fathers as much as mothers. Tender, wise fatherhood is beautiful as motherhood, but there are orphaned children to be cared for. These duties to the State and nation as mothers, true to the highest needs of our children, we dare not ignore; and the nation cannot much longer afford to have us ignore them. As statesmen, walking on the shore piled high with the "drift-wood of kings," the wrecks of nations and governments, you have discovered the one word emblazoned as an epitaph on each and every one, "Luxury, luxury, luxury!" You have hitherto placed a premium upon woman's idleness, helplessness, dependence. The children of most of our fashionable women are being educated by foreign nurses. How can you expect them to develop into patriotic American statesmen? For the sake of country I plead - for the sake of a responsible, exalted womanhood; for a daughter, with holiest, tenderest, most grateful memories clinging to the almost sacred name of father; as a wife, receiving constant encouragement, support, and cooperation from one who has revealed to her the genuine nobility of true manhood; as a mother, whose heart still thrills as the first greeting from her little son; and as a sister, watching with intense interest the entrance of a brother into the great world of work, I could not be half so loyal to woman's cause were it not a synonym for the equal rights of humanity - a diviner justice for all! With one practical question I rest my case. The world objected to woman's entrance into literature, the pulpit, the lyceum, the college, the school. What has she wrought? Our wisest thinkers and historians assert that literature has been purified. Poets and judges at international collegiate contests award to woman's thought the highest prize. Miss Lucia Peabody received upon the occasion of her second election to the Boston school board the highest vote ever polled for any candidate. Since woman has proved faithful over a few things, need you fear to summon her to your side to assist you in executing the will of A Bill of Attainder. 81 Preamble: We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish the constitution. This is declared to be a government "of the people." All power, it is said, centers in the people. Our State constitutions also open with the words, "We, the people." Does any one pretend to say that men alone constitute races and peoples? When we say parents, do we not mean mothers as well as fathers? When we say children, do we not mean girls as well as boys? When we say people, do we not mean women as well as men? When the race shall spring, Minerva-like, from the brains of their fathers, it will be time enough thus to ignore the fact that one-half the human family are women. Individual rights, individual conscience and judgment are our great American ideas, the fundamental principles of our political and religious faith. Men may as well attempt to do our repenting, confessing, and believing, as our voting - as well represent us at the throne of grace as at the ballot box. ARTICLE I, SEC. 9. - No bill of attainder, or ex post facto law shall be passed; no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States. SEC. 10. - No State shall pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility. Notwithstanding these provisions of the constitution, bills of attainder have been passed by the introduction of the word "male" into all the State constitutions denying to woman the right of suffrage, and thereby making sex a crime. A citizen disenfranchised in a republic is a citizen attainted. When we place in the hands of one class of citizens the right to make, interpret and execute the law for another class wholly unrepresented in the government, we have made an order of nobility. ARTICLE 4, SEC. 2. - The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States. The elective franchise is one of the privileges secured by this section approved in Dunham vs. Lamphere (3 Gray Mass. Rep., 276), and Bennett vs. Boggs (Baldwin's Rep., p. 72, Circuit Court U. S.). ARTICLE 4, SEC. 4. - The United States shall gurantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government. How can that form of government be called republican in which one- half the people are forever deprived of all participation in its affairs? ARTICLE 6. - This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof,.... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding. ARTICLE 14, SEC. I. - All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States..... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. In the discussion of the enfranchisement of woman, suffrage is now chained by one class of thinkers as a privilege based upon citizenship and secured by the Constitution of the United States, as by lexicographers as [*6*] 82 History of Woman Suffrage. well as by the constitution itself, the definition of citizen includes women as well as men. No State can rightfully deprive a woman-citizen of the United States of any fundamental right which is hers in common with all other citizens. The States have the right to regulate, but not to prohibit the elective franchise to citizens of the United States. Thus the States may determine the qualifications of electors. They may require the elector be of a certain age -- to have had a fixed residence -- to be of sane mind and unconnected of crime, --because these are qualifications or conditions that all citizens, sooner or later, may attain. But to go beyond this, and say to one-half the citizens of the State, notwithstanding you possess all of these qualifications, you shall never vote, is of the very essence of despotism. It is a bill of attainder of the most odious character. A further investigation of the subject will show that the constitutions of all the states, with the exception of Virginia and Massachusetts, read substantially alike. " White male citizens" shall be entitled to vote, and this is supposed to exclude all other citizens. There is no direct exclusion except in the two states above named. Now the error lies in supposing that an enabling clause is necessary at all. The right of the people of a State to participate in a government of their own creation requires no enabling clause, neither can it be taken from them by implication. To hold otherwise would be to interpolate in the constitution a prohibition that does not exist. In framing a constitution, the people are assembled in their sovereign capacity, and being possessed of all rights and powers, what is not surrendered is retained. Nothing short of a direct prohibition can work a deprivation of rights that are fundamental. In the language of John Jay to the people of New York, urging the adoption of the constitution of the United States: "Silence and blank paper neither give nor take away anything." And Alexander Hamilton says (Federalist, N. 83): Every man of discernment must at once perceive the wide difference between silence and abolition. The mode and manner in which the people shall take part in the government of their creation may be prescribed by the constitution but the right itself is antecedent to all constitutions. It is inalienable, and can neither be bought nor sold nor given away. But even if it should be held that this view is untenable, and that women are disfranchised by the several State constitutions, directly or by implication, then I say that such prohibitions are clearly in conflict with the Constitution of the United States and yield thereto. Another case of thinkers, equally interested in women's enfranchisement, maintain that there is, as yet, no power in the United States Constitution to protect the rights of all United States citizens, in all latitudes and longitudes, and in all conditions whatever. When the constitution was adopted, the fathers thought they had secured national unity. This was the opinion of the Southern as well as Northern statesmen. It was supposed that the question of State rights was then forever settled. Hon. Charles Sumner, speaking on this point in the United States Senate, March 7, 1866, said the object of the constitution was to ordain, under the authority of the people, a national government possessing unity and We, the People. 83 power. The confederation had been merely an agreement "between the States," styled, "a league of firm friendship." Found to be feeble and inoperative through the pretension of State rights, it gave way to the constitution which, instead of a "league," created a "union," in the name of the people of the United States. Beginning with these inspiring and enacting words, "We, the people," it was popular and national. Here was no concession to State rights, but a recognition of the power of the people, from whom the constitution proceeded. The States are acknowledged; ut they are all treated as component parts of the Union in which they are absorbed under the constitution, which is the supreme law. there is but one sovereignty, and that is the sovereignty of the United States. On this very account the adoption of the constitution was opposed by Patrick Henry and George Mason. the first exclaimed, "That this is a consolidated government is demonstrably clear; the question turns on that poor little thing, 'We, the people,' instead of the States." The second exclaimed, "Whether the constitution is good or bad, it is a national government, and no longer a confederation." But against this powerful opposition the constitution was adopted in the name of the people of the United States. Throughout the discussions, State rights was treated with little favor. Madison said: "The States are only political societies, and never possessed the right of sovereignty." Gerry said: "The States have only corporate rights." Wilson, the philanthropic member from Pennsylvania, afterward a learned Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States and author of the "Lectures on Law," said; "Will a regard to State rights justify the sacrifice of the rights of men? If we proceed on any other foundation than the last, our building will either be solid nor lasting." Those of us who understand the dignity, power and protection of the ballot, have steadily petitioned congress for the last ten years to secure to the women of the republic the exercise of their right to the elective franchise. We begin by asking a sixteenth amendment to the national constitution. March 15, 1869 , the Hon. George W. Julian submitted a joint resolution to congress, to enfranchise the women of the republic, by proposing a sixteenth amendment: Article 16. -- The right of suffrage in the United States shall be based on citizenship, and shall be regulated by Congress, and all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, shall enjoy this right equally, without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex. While the discussion was pending for the emancipation and enfranchisement of the slaves of the South, the popular thought led back to the consideration of the fundamental principles of our government, it was clearly seen that all the arguments for the civil and political rights of the African race applied to women also. Seeing this, some Republicans stood ready to carry these principles to their logical results. Democrats, too, saw the drift of the argument, and though not in favor of extending suffrage to either black men, or women, yet, to embarrass Republican legislation, it was said, they proposed amendments for woman suffrage to all bills brought forward for enfranchising the negroes. 84 History of Woman Suffrage. And thus, during the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, and the District suffrage bill, the question of woman suffrage was often and ably discussed in the Senate and House, and received both Republican and Democratic votes in its favor. Many able lawyers and judges gave it as their opinion that women as well as Africans were enfranchised by the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments. Accordingly, we abandoned, for the time being, our demand for a sixteenth amendment, and pleaded our right of suffrage, as already secured by the fourteenth amendment - the argument lying in a nut-shell, for if, as therein asserted, all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States; and if a citizen, according to the best authorities, is one possessed of all the rights and privileges of citizenship, namely, the right to make laws and choose lawmakers, women, being persons, must be citizens, and therefore entitled to the rights of citizenship, the chief of which is the right to vote. Accordingly, women tested their right, registered and voted - the inspectors of election accepting the argument, for which inspectors and women alike were arrested, tried and punished; the courts deciding that although by the fourteenth amendment they were citizens, still, citizenship did not carry with it the right to vote. But granting the premise of the Supreme Court decision, "that the constitution does not confer suffrage on any one," then it inhered with the citizen before the constitution was framed. Our national life does not date from that instrument. The constitution is not the original declaration of rights. It was not framed until eleven years after our existence as a nation, nor fully ratified until nearly fourteen years after the inauguration of our national independence. But however the letter and spirit of the constitution may be interpreted by the people, the judiciary of the nation has uniformly proved itself the echo of the party in power. When the slave power was dominant the Supreme Court decided that a black man was not a citizen, because he had not the right to vote; and when the constitution was so amended as to make all persons citizens, the same high tribunal decided that a woman, though a citizen, had not the right to vote. An African, by virtue of his United States citizenship, is declared, under recent amendments, a voter in every State of the Union; but when a woman, by virtue of her United States citizenship, applies to the Supreme Court for protection in the exercise of this same right, she is remanded to the State, by the unanimous decision of the nine judges on the bench, that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one." Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law must unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people. Seeing by these decisions of the courts that the theory of our government, the Declaration of Independence, and recent constitutional amendments, have no significance for woman, that all the grand principles of equality are glittering generalities for her, we must fall back once more to our former demand of a sixteenth amendment to the federal constitution, that, in clear, unmistakable language, shall declare the status of women in this republic. National Protection 85 The Declaration of Independence struck a blow at every existent form of government by making the individual the source of all power. This is the sun, and one central truth around which all genuine republics must keep their course or perish. National supremacy means something more than power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce. It means national protection and security in the exercise of the right to self-government, which comes alone by and through the use of the ballot. Women are the only class of citizens still wholly unrepresented in the government, and yet we possess every requisite qualification for voters in the United States. Women possess property and education; we take out naturalization-papers and passports and register ships. We preempt lands, pay taxes (women sometimes work out the road-tax with their own hands) and suffer for our own violation of laws. We are neither idiots, lunatics, nor criminals, and according to our State constitution lack but one qualification for voters, namely, sex, which is an insurmountable qualification, and therefore equivalent to a bill of attainder against one-half of the people, a power neither the States nor the United States can legally exercise, being forbidden in article I, sections 9, 10, of the constitution. Our rulers have the right to regulate this suffrage, but they cannot abolish it for any class of citizens, as has been done in the case of the women of this republic, without a direct violation of the fundamental law of the land. All concessions of privileges or redress of grievances are mockery for any class that have no voice in the laws, and law-makers; hence we demand the ballot, that scepter of power in our own hands, as the only sure protection for our rights of person and property under all conditions. If the few may grant and withhold rights at their pleasure, the many cannot be said to enjoy the blessings of self-government. William H. Seward said in his great speech on "Freedom and Union," in the United States Senate, February 29, 1860: Mankind have a natural right, a natural instinct, and a natural capacity for self- government; and when, as here, they are sufficiently ripened by culture, they will and must have self-government, and no other. Jefferson said: The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of freedom may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. Few people comprehend the length and breadth of the principle we are advocating to-day, and how closely it is allied to everything vital in our system of government. Our personal grievances, such as being robbed of property and children by unjust husbands; denied admission into the colleges, the trades and professions; compelled to work at starving prices, by no means round out this whole question. In asking for a sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, and the protection of congress against the injustice of State law, we are fighting the same battle as Jefferson and Hamilton fought in 1776, as Calhoun and Clay in 1828, as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in 1860, namely, the limit of State rights and federal power. The enfranchisement of woman involves the same vital principle of our government that is dividing and distracting the two great political parties at this hour. 86 History of Woman Suffrage. There is nothing a foreigner coming here finds it so difficult to understand as the wheel within a wheel in our national and State governments, and the possibility of carrying them on without friction; and this is the difficulty and danger we are fast finding out. The recent amendments are steps in the right direction toward national unity, securing equal rights to all citizens, in every latitude and longitude. But our congressional debates, judicial decisions, and the utterances of campaign orators, continually falling back to the old ground, are bundles of contradictions on this vital question. Inasmuch as we are, first, citizens of the United States, and second, of the State wherein we reside, the primal rights of all citizens should be regulated by the national government, and complete equality in civil and political rights everywhere secured. When women are denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice in the professions, unjust discriminations made against sex even more degrading and humiliating than were ever made against color, surely woman, too, should be protected by a civil-rights bill and a sixteenth amendment that should make her political status equal with all other citizens of the republic. The right of suffrage, like the currency of the post-office department, demands national regulation. We can all remember the losses sustained by citizens in traveling from one State to another under the old system of State banks. We can imagine the confusion if each State regulated its post-offices, and the transit of the mails across its borders. The benefits we find in uniformity and unity in these great interests would pervade all others where equal conditions were secured. Some citizens are asking for a national bankrupt law, that a person released from his debts in one State may be free in every other. Some are for a religious freedom amendment that shall forever separate church and State; forbidding a religious test as a condition of suffrage or a qualification for office; forbidding the reading of the Bible in the schools and the exempting of church property and sectarian institutions of learning or charity from taxation. Some are demanding a national marriage law, that a man legally married in one State may not be a bigamist in another. Some are asking a national prohibitory law, that a reformed drunkard who is shielded from temptation in one State may not be environed with dangers in another. And thus many individual interests point to a growing feeling among the people in favor of homogeneous legislation. As several of the States are beginning to legislate on the woman suffrage question, it is of vital moment that there should be some national action. As the laws now are, a woman who can vote, hold office, be tried by a jury of her own peers - yea, and sit on the bench as justice of the peace in the territory of Wyoming, may be reduced to a political pariah in the State of New York. A woman who can vote and hold office on the school board, and act as county superintendent in Kansas and Minnesota, is denied these rights in passing into Pennsylvania. A woman who can be a member of the school board in Maine, Wisconsin, Iowa, and California, loses all these privileges in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. When representatives from the territories are sent to congress by the A Fourfold Compromise 87 votes of women, it is time to have some national recognition of this class of citizens. This demand of national protection for national citizens is fated to grow stronger every day. The government of the United States, as the constitution is now interpreted, is powerless to give a just equivalent for the supreme allegiance it claims. One sound democratic principle fully recognized and carried to its logical results in our government, declaring all citizens equal before the law, would soon chase away the metaphysical mists and fogs that cloud out political views in so many directions. When congress is asked to put the name of God in the constitution, and thereby pledge the nation to some theological faith in which some United States citizens may not believe and thus subject a certain class to political ostracism and social persecution, it is asked not to protect but to oppress the citizens of the several States in their most sacred rights - to think, reason, and decide all questions of religion and conscience for themselves, without fear or favor from the government. Popular sentiment and church persecution is all that an advanced thinker in science and religion should be called on to combat. The State should rather throw its shield of protection around those uttering liberal, progressive ideas; for the nation has the same interest in every new thought as it has in the invention of new machinery to lighten labor, in the discovery of wells of oil, or mines of coal, copper, iron, silver or gold. As in the laboratory of nature new forms of beauty are forever revealing themselves, so in the world of thought a higher outlook gives a clearer vision of the heights man in freedom shall yet attain. The day is past for persecuting the philosophers of the physical sciences. But what a holocaust of martyrs bigotry is still making of those bearing the richest treasures of thought, in religion and social ethics, in their efforts to roll off the mountains of superstition that have so long darkened the human mind! The numerous demands by the people for national protection in many rights not specified in the constitution, prove that the people have outgrown the compact that satisfied the fathers, and the more it is expounded and understood the more clearly its monarchical features can be traced to its English origin. And it is not at all surprising that, with no chart or compass for a republic, our fathers, with all their educational prejudices in favor of the mother country, with her literature and systems of jurisprudence, should have also adopted her ideas of government, and in drawing up their national compact engrafted the new republic on the old constitutional monarchy, a union whose incompatibility has involved their sons in continued discussion as to the true meaning of the instrument. A recent writer says: The Constitution of the United States is the result of a fourfold compromise: First - Of unity with individual interests; of national sovereignty with the so-called sovereignty of States; Second - Of the republic with monarchy; Third - Of freedom with slavery; Fourth - Of democracy with aristocracy. It is founded, therefore, on the fourfold combination of principles perfectly incompatible and eternally excluding each other; founded for the purpose of equally preserving these principles in spite of their incompatibility 88 History of Woman Suffrage. incompatibility, and of carrying out their practical results - in other words, for the purpose of making an impossible thing possible. And a century of discussion has not yet made the constitution understood. It has no settled interpretation. Being a series of compromises, it can be expounded in favor of many directly opposite principles. A distinguished American statesman remarked that the war of the rebellion was waged "to expound the constitution." It is a pertinent question now, shall all other contradictory principles be retained in the constitution until they, too, are expounded by civil war? On what theory is it less dangerous to defraud twenty million women of their inalienable rights than four million negroes? Is not the same principle involved in both cases? We ask congress to pass a sixteenth amendment, not only for woman's protection, but for the safety of the nation. Our people are filled with unrest to-day because there is no fair understanding of the basis of individual rights, nor the legitimate power of the national government. The Republican party took the ground during the war that congress had the right to establish a national currency in every State; that it had the right to emancipate and enfranchise the slaves; to change their political status in one-half the States of the union; to pass a civil rights bill, securing to the freedman a place in the schools, colleges, trades, professions, hotels, and all public conveyances for travel. And they maintained their right to do all these as the best measures for peace, though compelled by war. And now, when congress is asked to extend the same protection to the women of the nation, we are told they have not the power, and we are remanded to the States. They say the emancipation of the slave was a war measure, a military necessity; that his enfranchisement was a political necessity. We might with propriety ask if the present condition of the nation, with its political outlook, its election frauds daily reported, the corrupt action of men in official position, governors, judges, and boards of canvassers, has not brought us to a moral necessity where some new element is needed in government. But, alas! when women appeal to congress for the protection of their natural rights of person and property, they send us for redress to the courts, and the courts remand us to the States. You did not trust the Southern freedman to the arbitrary will of courts and States! Why send your mothers, wives and daughters to the unwashed, unlettered, unthinking masses that carry popular elections? We are told by one class of philosophers that the growing tendency to increase national power and authority is leading to a dangerous centralization; that the safety of the republic rests in local self-government. Says the editor of the Boston Index: What is local self-government? Briefly, that without any interference from without, every citizen should manage his personal affairs in his own way, according to his own pleasure; that every town should manage its own town affairs in the same manner and under the same restriction; every county its own county affairs, every State its own State affairs. But the independent exercise of this autonomy, by personal and corporate individuals, has one fundamental condition, viz.: the maintenance of all these individualities intact, each in its own sphere of action, with its rights uninfringed and its freedom curtailed in that sphere, yet each also preserving its just relation to all the What is Centralization? 89 rest in an all comprehensive social organization. Every citizen would thus stand, as it were, in the center of several concentric and enlarging circles of relationship to his kind; he would have duties and rights in each relation, not only as an individual but also as a member of town, county, State and national organization. His local self- government will be at his highest possible point of realization, when in each of these relations his individual duties are discharged and his rights maintained. On the other hand, what is centralization? It is such a disorganization of this well-balanced, harmonious and natural system as shall result in the absorption of all substantial power by a central authority, to the destruction of the autonomy of the various individualities above mentioned; such as was produced, for instance, when the municipia of the Roman empire lost their corporate independence and melted into the vast imperial despotism which prepared the way for the collapse of society under the blows of Northern barbarism. Such a centralization must inevitably be produced by decay of that stubborn stickling for rights, out of which local self-government has always grown. That is, if individual rights in the citizen, the town, the county, the State, shall not be vindicated as beyond all price, and defended with the utmost jealousy, at whatever cost, the spirit of liberty must have already died out, and the dreary process of centralization be already far advanced. It will thus be evident that the preservation of individual rights is the only possible preventative of centralization, and that free society has no interest to be compared for an instant in importance with that of preserving these individual rights. No nation is free in which this is not the paramount concern. Woe to America when her sons and her daughters begin to sneer at rights! Just so long as the citizens are protected individually in their rights, the towns and counties and States cannot be stripped; but if the former lose all love for their own liberties as equal units of society, the latter will become the empty shells of creatures long perished. The nation as such, therefore, if it would be itself free and non-centralized, must find its own supreme interest in the protection of its individual citizens in the fullest possible enjoyment of their equal rights and liberties. As this question of women's enfranchisement is one of national safety, we ask you to remember that we are citizens of the United States, and, as such, claim the protection of the national flag in the exercise of our national rights, in every latitude and longitude, on sea, land, at home as well as abroad; against the tyranny of States, as well as against foreign aggressions. Local authorities may regulate the exercise of these rights; they may settle all minor questions of property, but the inalienable personal rights of citizenship should be declared by the constitution, interpreted by the Supreme Court, protected by congress and enforced by the arm of the executive. It is nonsense to talk of State rights until the graver question of personal liberties is first understood and adjusted. President Hayes, in reply to an address of welcome at Charlottesville, Va., September 25, 1877, said: Equality under the laws for all citizens in the corner-stone of the structure of the restored harmony from which the ancient friendship is to rise. In this pathway I am going, the pathway where your illustrious men led - your Jefferson, your Madison, your Monroe, your Washington. If, in this statement, President Hayes is thoroughly insincere, then he will not hesitate to approve emphatically the principle of national protection for national citizens. He will see that the protection of all the national citizens in all their rights, civil, political, and religious - not by the muskets of United States troops, but by the peaceable authority of United 90 History of Women Suffrage. States courts--is not a principle that applies to a single section of the country, but to all sections alike; he will see that the incorporation of such a principle in the constitution cannot be regarded as a measure of force imposed upon the vanquished, since it would be law alike to the vanquished and the victor. In short, he will see that there is no other sufficient guarantee of that equality of all citizens, which he well declares to be the "corner-stone of the structure of restored harmony." The Boston Journal of July 19, said: There are cases where it seems as if the constitution should empower the federal government to step in and protect the citizen in the State, when the local authorities are in league with the assassins; but, as it now reads, no such provision exists. That the constitution does not make such provision is not the fault of the president: it must be attributed to the leading Republicans who had it in their power once to change the constitution so as to give the most ample powers to the general government. When Attorney-General Devens was charged last May with negligence in not prosecuting the parties accused of the mountain Meadow massacre, his defense was, that this horrible crime was not against the United States, but against the territory of Utah. Yet, it was a great company of industrious, honest, unoffending United States citizens who were foully and brutally murdered in cold blood. When Chief-Justice Waite gave his charge to the jury in the Ellentown conspiracy cases, at Charleston, S.C., June 1, 1877, he said: That a number of citizens of the United States have been killed, there can be no question; but that is not enough to enable the government of the United States to interfere for their protection. Under the constitution that duty belongs to the State alone. But when an unlawful combination is made to interfere with any of the rights of natural citizenship secured to citizens of the United States by the national constitution, then an offense is committed against the laws of the United States, and it is not only the right but the absolute duty of the national government to interfere and afford the citizens that protection which every good government is bound to give. General Hawley, in an address before a college last spring, said: Why, it is asked, does our government permit outrages in a State which it would exert all its authority to redress, even at the risk of war, if they were perpetrated under a foreign government? Are the rights of American citizens more sacred on the soil of Great Britain or France than on the soil of one of our own States? Not at all. But the government of the United States is clothed with power to act with imperial sovereignty in the one case, while in the other its authority is limited to the degree of utter impotency, in certain circumstances. The State sovereignty excludes the Federal over most matters of dealing between man and man, and if the State laws are properly enforced there is not likely to be any ground of complaint, but if they are not the federal government, if not specially called on according to the terms of the constitution, is helpless. Citizen A .B., grievously wronged, beaten, robbed,lynched within a hair's breadth of death, may apply in vain to any all prosecuting officers of the State. The forms of law that might give him redress are all there; the prosecuting officers, judges, and sheriffs, that might act, are there; but, under an oppressive and tyranical public sentiment, they refuse to move. In such an exigency the government of the United States can do no more than the government of any neighboring State; that is, unless the State concerned calls for aid, or unless the offense rises to the dignity of insurrection or rebellion. The reason is, that the framers of our govermental system left to the several States the sole guardianship of the personal and relative private rights of the people. Greatly Fear this Policy 91 Such is the imperfect development of our own nationality in this respect that we have really no right as yet to call ourselves a nation in the true sense of the word, nor shall we have while this state of things continues. Thousands have begun to feel this keenly, of which a few illustrations may suffice. A communication to the New York Tribune, June 9, signed "Merchant," said" Before getting into a quarrel and perhaps war with Mexico about the treatment of our flag and citizens, would it not be as well, think you, for the government to try and make the flag a protection to the citizens on our own soil? That is what it has never been since the foundation of our government in a large portion of our common country. The kind of government the people of this country expect and intend to have--State rights or no State rights, no matter how much blood and treasure it may cost--is a government to protect the humblest citizen in the exercise of all his rights. When the rebellion of the South against the government began, one of the most noted secessionists of Baltimore asked one of the regular army officers what the government expected to gain by making war on the South. "Well," the officer replied, laying his hand on the cannon by which he was standing, "we intend to use these until it is as safe for a Northern man to express his political opinions in the South, as it is for a Southern many to express his in the North." Senator Blaine, at a banquet in Trenton, N.J., July 2, declared that a "government which did not offer protection to every citizen in every State had no right to demand allegiance." Ex-Senator Wade, of Ohio, in a letter to the Washington National Republican of July 16, said of the president's policy: I greatly fear this policy, under cover of what is called local self-government, is but an ignominious surrender of the principles of nationality for which our armies fought and for which thousands of our brave men died,and without which the war was a failure and our boasted government a myth. Behind the slavery of the colored race was the principle of State rights. Their emancipation and enfranchisement were important, not only as a vindication of our great republican idea of individual rights, but as the first blow in favor of national unity--of a consistent, homogeneous government. As all our difficulties, State and national, are finally referred to the constitution, it is of vital importance that that instrument should not be susceptible of a different interpretation from every possible standpoint. It is folly to spend another century in expounding the equivocal language of the constitution. If under that instrument, supposed to be the Magna Charta of American liberties, all United States citizens do not stand equal before the law, it should without further delay be so amended as in plain, unmistakable language to declare what are the rights, privileges, and immunities that belong to the citizens of a republic. There is no reason why the people of to-day should be governed by the laws and constitutions of men long since dead and buried. Surely those who understand the vital issues of this hour are better able to legislate for the living present that those who governed a hundred years ago. If the nineteenth century is to be governed by the opinions of the eighteenth, 92 History of Woman Suffrage. and the twentieth by the nineteenth, the world will always be governed by dead men....... The cry of centralization could have little significance if the constitution was so amended as to protect all United States citizens in their inalienable rights. That national supremacy that hold individual freedom and equality more sacred than State rights and secures representation to all classes of people, is a very different form of centralization from that in which all the forces of society are centered in a single arm. But the recognition of the principle of national supremacy, as declared in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, has been practically nullified and the results of the war surrendered, by remanding woman to the States for the protection of her civil and political rights. The Supreme Court decisions and the congressional reports on this point are in direct conflict with the idea of national unity, and the principle of States rights involved in this discussion must in time remand all United States citizens alike to State authority for the protection of those rights declared to inhere in the people at the foundation of the government. You may listen to our demands, gentlemen, with dull ears, and smile incredulously at the idea of danger to our institutions from continued violation of the civil and political rights of women, but the question of what citizens shall enjoy the rights of suffrage involves our national existence; for, if the constitutional rights of the humblest citizen may be invaded with impunity, laws interpreted on the side of injustice, judicial decisions based not on reason, sound argument, nor the spirit and letter of our declarations and theories of government, but on the customs of society and what dead men are supposed to have thought, not what they said - what will the rights of the ruling powers even be in the future with a people educated into such modes of thought and action? The treatment of every individual in a community - in our courts, prisons, asylums, of every class of petitioners before congress - strengthens or undermines the foundations of that temple of liberty whose corner-stones were laid one century ago with bleeding hands and anxious hearts, with the hardships, privations, and sacrifices of a seven years' war. He who is able from the conflicts of the present to forecast the future events, cannot but contemplate with anxiety the fate of this republic, unless our constitution be at once subjected to a thorough emendation, making it more comprehensively democratic. A review of the history of our nation during the century will show the American people that all the obstacles that have impeded their political, moral and material progress from the dominion of slavery down to the present epidemic of political corruptions, are directly and indirectly traceable to the federal constitution as their source and support. Hence the necessity of prompt and appropriate amendments. Nothing that is incorrect in principle can ever be productive of beneficial results, and no custom or authority is able to alter or overrule this inviolate law of development. The catch-phrases of politicians, such as "organic development," "the logic of events," and "things will regulate themselves," have deceived the thoughtless long enough. There is just one road to safety, No Title so Proud as American Citizen. 93 and that is to understand the law governing the situation and to bring the nation in line with it. Grave political problems are solved in two ways - by a wise forethought, and reformation; or by general dissatisfaction, resistance, and revolution. In closing, let me remind you, gentlemen, that woman has not been a heedless spectator of all the great events of the century, nor a dull listener to the grand debates on human freedom and equality. She has learned the lesson of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and self-government in the same school with the heroes of American liberty.* MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE, of New York, corresponding secretary of the association, said: Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee - You have heard the general argument for woman from Mrs. Stanton, but there are women here from all parts of the Union, and each one feels that she must say a word to show how united we stand. It is because we have respect for law that we come before you to-day. We recognize the fact that in good law lies the security of all our rights, but as woman has been denied the constructive rights of the declaration and constitution, she is obliged to ask for a direct recognition in the adoption of a sixteenth amendment. The first principle of liberty is division of power. In the country of the czar or the sultan there is no liberty of thought or action, In limited monarchies power is somewhat divided, and we find larger liberty and a broader civilization. Coming to the United States we find a still greater division of power, a still more extended liberty - civil, religious, political. No nation in the world is as respected as our own; no title so proud as that of American citizen; it carried with it abroad a protection as large as did that of Rome two thousand years ago. But as proud as is this name of American citizen, it brings with it only shame and humiliation to one-half of the nation. Woman has no part nor lot in the matter. The pride of citizenship is not for her, for woman is still a political slave. While the form of our government seems to include the whole people, one-half of them are denied a right to participate in its benefits, are denied the right of self-government. Women equally with man has natural rights; woman equally with man is a responsible being. It is said women are not fit for freedom. Well, then, secure us freedom and make us fit for it. Macaulay said many politicians of his time were in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people were fit to be free till they were in a condition to use their freedom; -------------- *In the whole course of our struggle for equal rights I never felt more exasperated than on this occasion, standing before a committee of men many years my juniors, all comfortably seated in armchairs, I pleading for rights they all enjoyed though in no respect my superiors, denied me on the shallow grounds of sex. But this humiliation I had often felt before. The peculiarly aggravating feature of the present occasion was the studied inattention and contempt of the chairman, Senator Wadleigh of New Hampshire. Having prepared my argument with care, I naturally desired the attention of every member of the committee, all of which, with the exception of Senator Wadleigh, I seemingly had. He however took special pains to show that he did not intend to listen. He alternately looked over some manuscripts and newspapers before him, then jumped up to open or close a door or window. He stretched, yawned, gazed at the ceiling, cut his nails, sharpened his pencil, changing his occupation and position every two minutes, effectually preventing the establishment of the faintest magnetic current between the speakers and the committee. It was with difficulty I restrained the impulse more than once to hurl my manuscript at his head. - [E. C. S. 94 History of Woman Suffrage. "but," said Macaulay, "this maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men [or women] are to wait for liberty till they become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever." There has been much talk about precedent. Many women in this country vote upon school questions, and in England at all municipal elections. I wish to call your attention a little further back, to the time that the Saxons first established free government in England. Women, as well as men, took part in the Witenagemote, the great national council of our Saxon ancestors in England. When Whightred, king of Kent, in the seventh century, assembled the national legislature at Baghamstead to enact a new code of laws, the queen, abbesses, and many ladies of quality signed the decrees. Also, at Beaconsfield, the abbesses took part in the council. In the reign of Henry III, four women took seats in parliament, and in the reign of Edward I, ten ladies were called to parliament and helped to govern Great Britain. Also, in 1252, Henry left his Queen Elinor as keeper of the great seal, or lord chancellor, while he went abroad. She sat in the Aula Regia, the highest court of the kingdom, holding the highest judicial power in great Britain. Not only among our forefathers in Britain do we find that women took part in government, but, going back to the Roman Empire, we find the Emperor Heliogabalus introducing his mother into the senate, and giving her a seat near the consuls. He also established a senate of women, which met on the Collis Quirinalis. When Aurelian was emperor he favored the representation of women, and determined to revive this senate, which in lapse of time had fallen to decay. Plutarch mentions that women sat and deliberated in councils, and on questions of peace and war. Hence we have precedents extending very far back into history. It is sometimes said that women do not desire freedom. But I tell you the desire for freedom lives in every heart. It may be hidden as the water of the never-freezing, rapid-flowing river Neva is hidden. In the winter the ice from Lake Lagoda floats down till it is met by the ice setting up from the sea, when they unite and form a compact mass over it. Men stand upon it, sledges run over it, splendid palaces are built upon it; but beneath all the Neva still rapidly flows, itself unfrozen. The presence of these women before you shows their desire for freedom. They have come from the North, from the South, from the East, from the West, and from the far Pacific slope, demanding freedom for themselves and for all women. Our demands are often met by the most intolerable tyranny. The Albany Law Journal, one of the most influential legal journals of the great State of New York, had the assurance a few years ago to tell Miss Anthony and myself if we were not suited with "our laws" we could leave the country. What laws did they mean? Men's laws. If we were not suited with these men's laws, made by them to protect themselves, we could leave the country. We were advised to expatriate ourselves, to banish ourselves. But we shall not do it, it is our country, and we shall stay here and change the laws. We shall secure their amendment, so that under them there shall be exact and permanent political equality Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.