citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.
"Individual rights," "Individual conscience and judgment," are great American ideas, underlying our whole political and religious life. We are here to-day to ask a Congress of Republicans for that crowning act that shall secure to 15,000,000 women the right to protect their persons, property, and opinions by law. The XIV. Amendment, having told us who are citizens of the republic, further declares that "no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the 'privileges or immunities' of 'citizens' of the United States." Some say that "privileges and immunities" do not include the right of suffrage. We answer that any person under Government who has no voice in the laws or the rulers has his privileges and immunities abridged at every turn, and when a State denies the right of suffrage, it robs the citizen of his citizenship and of all power to protect his person or property by law.
Disfranchised classes are ever helpless and degraded classes. One can readily judge of the political status of a citizen by the tone of the press. Go back a few years, and you find the Irishman the target for all the gibes and jeers of the nation. You could scarce take up a paper without finding some joke about "Pat" and his last bull. But in process of time "Pat" became a political power in the land, and editors and politicians could not afford to make fun of him. Then "Sambo" took his turn. They ridiculed his thick skull, woolly head, shin-bone, long heel, etc., but he, too, has become a political power; he sits in the Congress of the United States and in the Legislature of Massachusetts, and now politicians and editors can not afford to make fun of him.
Now, who is their target? Woman. They ridicule all alike—the strong-minded for their principles, the weak minded for their panniers. How long think you the New York Tribune would maintain its present scurrilous tone if the votes of women could make Horace Greeley Governor of New York? The editor of the Tribune knows the value of votes, and if, honorable gentlemen, you will give us a "Declaratory law," forbidding the States to deny or abridge our rights, there will be no need of arguments to change the tone of his journal; its columns will speedily glow with demands for the protection of woman as well as broadcloth and pig-iron. Then we might find out what he knows and cares for our real and relative value in the Government.
Without some act of Congress regulating suffrage for women as well as black men, women citizens of the United States who, in Washington, Utah, and Wyoming Territories, are voters and jurors, and who, in the State of Kansas, vote on school and license questions, would be denied the exercise of their right to vote in all the States of the Union, and no naturalization papers, education, property, residence, or age could help them. What an anomaly is this in a republic! A woman who in Wyoming enjoys all the rights, privileges, and immunities of a sovereign, by crossing the line into Nebraska, sinks at once to the political degradation of a slave. Humiliated with such injustice, one set of statesmen