Miss Anthony, put "sex" where I have "race" or "color," and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a XVI. Amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the XIV. and XV. under protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these in an eminent degree; and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta, to protect every citizen of the Republic.
But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them—they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Senator Sumner, putting sex where he did color, would have said:
Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than size, race, color, or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without representation, against which our revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled.
For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it, the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy; the most hateful ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely this oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation, can not be endured. And yet this odious aristocracy exists in the face of Section 4, of Article 4, which says:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of government.
What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants of a Monarchical and those of a Republican form of government, save that in the Monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound to obey laws made by superiors—while in the Republican, the people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power, to make and unmake both their laws and their law makers. And the moment you deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade him from the status of a citizen to that of a subject, and it matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as here in the United States.
But, it is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him, in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be