Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/176

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118
HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

ditions of Liberty attracted special attention. Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers (N. Y.) proved in an original manner that There is Nothing New under the Sun. In a statesmanlike paper Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) set forth the authority of Congress to secure to woman her right to the ballot:

To protect all citizens in the use of the ballot by national authority is not to deprive the States of the right of local self-government. When Andrew Jackson, who had been elected as a State's Rights man, asserted the supremacy of the National Government, that assertion, carried out as it was, did not deprive States of their power of self-government. Neither did the Reconstruction Acts nor the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Yet in many ways it is proved that States are not sovereign. Besides their inability to coin money, to declare peace and war, they are proved by their own acts not even to be self-protective. If women as individuals, as one-half of the people, call upon the nation for protection, they are doing no more nor less than so-called sovereign States themselves do. National aid has been frequently asked to preserve peace, or to insure that protection found impossible under mere local or State authority.

In ratifying an amendment States become factors in the nation, the same as by the acts of their representatives and senators in Congress. A law created by themselves in this way can be no interference with their local rights of self-government; because in helping enact these laws, either through congressional action, or by legislative ratification of amendments, each State has arisen above and beyond itself into a higher national realm.

The one right above all others which is not local is the right of self-government. That right being the corner stone on which the nation was founded, is a strictly national right. It is not local, it is not State. ....

It does not matter by what instrumentality—whether by State constitution or by statute law—woman has been deprived of her national right of self-government, it is none the less the duty of Congress to protect her in regaining it. Surely her right to govern herself is of as much value as the protection of property, the quelling of riots, the destruction or establishment of banks, the guarding of the polls, the securing of a free ballot for the colored race or the taking of it from a Mormon voter.

In her address on The Work of Women, Miss Mary F. Eastman (Mass.) said: "Men say the work of the State is theirs. The State is the people. The origin of government is simply that two men call in a third for umpire. The ideal of the State is gradually rising. No State can be finer in its type of government than the individuals who make it. We enunciate a grand