that the States should enact laws making it the duty of inspectors of election to receive women's votes on precisely the same conditions they do those of men.
Judge Stanley Matthews—a substantial Ohio Democrat—in his preliminary speech at the Cincinnati Convention, said most emphatically:
The Constitutional Amendments have established the political equality of all citizens before the law.
President Grant, in his message to Congress March 30, 1870, on the adoption of the XV. Amendment, said:
A measure which makes at once four millions of people voters, is indeed a measure of greater importance than any act of the kind from the foundation of the Government to the present time.
How could the four million negroes be made voters if the two million women were not included?
The California State Republican Convention said:
Among the many practical and substantial triumphs of the principles achieved by the Republican party during the past twelve years, we may enumerate with pride and pleasure, the prohibiting of any State from abridging the privileges of any citizen of the Republic, the declaring the civil and political equality of every citizen, and the establishing of all these principles in the Federal Constitution by amendments thereto, as the permanent law.
Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me said:
I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens. And again, It is not laws we want; there are plenty of laws—good enough, too. Administrative ability to enforce law is the great want of the age, in this country especially. Everybody talks of law, law. If everybody would insist on the enforcement of law, the government would stand on a firmer basis, and questions would settle themselves.
And it is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution that our National Woman Suffrage Association, which celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman's rights movement, in New York on the 6th of May next, has based all its arguments and action the past three years. We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right to vote." We appeal to the inspectors of election everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens, as it is their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well. We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of "guilty" against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections; or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of election, for receiving and counting such citizens' votes. We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equality to women, remembering that
The true rule of interpretation under our National Constitution, especially since its Amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights unconstitutional.
