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[Pg 509] answer her appeals by sending her for redress to the courts; another advises her to submit her qualifications to the States; but we, with a clearer intuition of the rightful power, come to you who thoughtfully, conscientiously, and understandingly passed that Amendment defining the word "citizen," declaring suffrage a foundation right. How are women "citizens" from Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, moving in other States, to be protected in the rights they have heretofore enjoyed, unless Congress shall pass the bill presented by Mr. Butler, and thus give us a homogeneous law on suffrage from Maine to Louisiana? Remember, these are citizens of the United States as well as of the Territories and States wherein they may reside, and their rights as such are of primal consideration. One of your own amendments to the Federal Constitution, honorable gentlemen, says "that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." We have women of different races and colors, as well as men. It takes more than men to compose peoples and races, and no one denies that all women suffer the disabilities of a present or previous condition of servitude. Clearly the State may regulate, but can not deny the exercise of this right to any citizen.
You did not leave the negroes to the tender mercies of the courts and States. Why send your mothers, wives, and daughters suppliants at the feet of the unwashed, unlettered, unthinking masses that carry our elections in the States? Would you compel the women of New York to sue the Tweeds, the Sweeneys, the Connollys, for their inalienable rights, or to have the scales of justice balanced for them in the unsteady hand of a Cardozo, a Barnard, or a McCunn? Nay, nay; the proper tribunal to decide nice questions of human rights and constitutional interpretations, the political status of every citizen under our national flag, is the Congress of the United States. This is your right and duty, clearly set forth in article 1, section 5, of the Constitution, for how can you decide the competency and qualifications of electors for members of either House without settling the fundamental question on what the right of suffrage is based? All power centers in the people. Our Federal Constitution, as well as that of every State, opens with the words, "We, the people." However this phrase may have been understood and acted on in the past, women to-day are awake to the fact that they constitute one half the American people; that they have the right to demand that the constitution shall secure to them "justice," "domestic tranquillity," and the "blessings of liberty." So long as women are not represented in the government they are in a condition of tutelage, perpetual minority, slavery.
You smile at the idea of women being slaves in this country. Benjamin Franklin said long ago, "that they who have no voice in making the laws, or in the election of those who administer them, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and to their representatives." I might occupy hours in quoting grand liberal sentiments from the fathers—Madison, Jefferson, Otis, and Adams—in favor of individual representation. I might quote equally noble words from