we had great hesitation about adjourning, for fear that the people represented by these males who are now to be invested with the franchise were in an actually starving condition in this District, and that the chief authorities of the District, moved, I have no doubt, by that humanity which ought to characterize them everywhere, investigated the matter and reported to us, we were obliged to appropriate $25,000 to relieve them in their immediate wants; I do not think that speaks so well for the male portion of the African population of this city.
I believe if it were to come to the last resort, that the female Africans of the District of Columbia have more merit, more industry, more of all that which is calculated to make them good and virtuous members of society than the males have. Why should you not throw them in? Why should you throw this batch of males into the ballot-box without any countervailing element which would be efficacious to qualify it and make it better?
To me it is perfectly plain. I have reconciled my mind to negro suffrage, but while I reconcile myself to negro suffrage as inevitable, I hold it to be my bounden duty to insist upon female suffrage at the same time. I am happy to say that in this opinion I am not alone; that while I favor universal suffrage limited by the age of twenty-one years so far, there are others who have been led to this same train of thought with myself. I beg, therefore, to read a letter dated Jefferson, Ohio, November 14, 1866:
"Madam:—Yours of the 9th instant is received, and I desire to say in reply that I am now and ever have been the advocate of equal and impartial suffrage of all citizens of the United States who have arrived at the age of twenty-one years, who are of sound mind, and who have not disqualified themselves by the commission of any offence, without any distinction on account of race, color, or sex. Every argument that ever has been or ever can be adduced to prove that males should have the right to vote, applies with equal if not greater force to prove that females should possess the same right; and were I a citizen of your State I should labor with whatever of ability I possess to ingraft those principles in its constitution.
"To Susan B. Anthony, Secretary American Equal Rights Association."
Now, Mr. President, I ask whether this has not an orthodox sanction at least. I should like to know who would question, who would dare to question, the orthodoxy of the honorable Senator from Ohio, and who dares tell me that this is such a novelty that it is not to be introduced here as serious, as in earnest? Sir, I say that I am perfectly in earnest, and I say that if this amendment be incorporated in this bill I shall vote for it with all my heart and soul. I beg to be understood that I would not inaugurate the movement, I would not make the change by my own mere motion, because I would not venture upon the change anywhere. That change must rise out of, spring out of, and come up from society generally. It is that thing which the poet has called the vox populi, and which he likens to the vox Dei. When the community spontaneously demands this call, when the community spontaneously demands this action, I yield to it. It is so in this instance. While I yield to the de
