a well-nigh fatal disease; intemperance has no sufficient foe in the law-making power; a republican form of government can not survive half-slave and half-free.
The ballot is withheld from women because men are not willing to part with one-half the sovereign power. There is no other real cause for the continued perpetration of this unnatural tyranny.
Enfranchise women or this republic will steadily advance to the same destruction, the same ignoble and tragic catastrophe, which has engulfed the male republics of history. Let us establish a government in which both men and women shall be free indeed. Then shall the republic be perpetual.
The women of the nation are deeply indebted to Senator Blair for his able and persistent efforts in their behalf. Year after year, in the midst of the great pressure of duties connected with his office, he carefully prepared these constitutional and legal reports knowing that they could have only the indirect results of educating public sentiment and contributing to the history of this great movement for the political rights of half the race.
The other members of the committee, Senators Zebulon B. Vance (N. C.), Joseph E. Brown (Ga.), J. B. Beck (Ky.), announced that they should present a minority report in opposition, but as "Letters from a Chimney Corner," by Mrs. Caroline F. Corbin, and "The Law of Woman Life," by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, apparently had been exhausted, and as no other woman had provided them with the necessary ideas, the report never materialized. Senator Vance, however, as chairman of this Select Suffrage Committee asked for a clerk at this time, to be paid out of the contingent fund.
The House Judiciary Committee granted a hearing January 28, which was addressed by Miss Anthony, Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Duniway, Mrs. Minor, the Rev. Olympia Brown, Mrs. Colby, Miss Lavina A. Hatch (Mass.) and Mrs. Ella M. Marble (Minn.). The committee took no action.
73 It is a loss to posterity that Miss Shaw never writes her addresses. She is beyond question the leading woman orator of this generation, and is not surpassed in power by any of the men.
74 See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 647.
75 This was done, but no representation was allowed women in the celebration.
CHAPTER X.
The National-American Convention of 1890.
The winter of 1890 brought the usual crowd of eminent women to Washington to attend the Twenty-second national convention of the suffrage association, February 18-21. As the president, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was to start for Europe on the 19th, the congressional hearings took place previous to the convention and consisted only of her address. The Senate hearing on February 8 was held for the first time in the new room set apart for the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage, but much objection was made because on account of its size only a small audience could be admitted. Senators Vance, Farwell, Blair and John B. Allen of the new State of Washington were present. Mrs. Stanton said in part:
For almost a quarter of a century a body of intelligent and law-abiding women have held annual conventions in Washington and made their appeals before committees of the House and the Senate, asking to be recognized as citizens of this Republic. A whole generation of distinguished members, who have each in turn given us aid and encouragement, have passed away—Seward, Sumner, Wilson, Giddings, Wade, Garfield, Morton and Sargent—with Hamlin, Butler and Julian still living, have all declared our demands just, our arguments unanswerable.
In consulting at an early day as to the form in which our claims should be presented, some said by an amendment to the Constitution, others said the Constitution as it is, in spirit and letter, is broad enough to protect the rights of every citizen under our flag. But when the war came and we saw that it took three amendments to make the slaves of the South full-fledged citizens, we thought it would take at least one to make woman's calling and election sure. So we asked for a Sixteenth Amendment. But learned lawyers, Judges and Congressmen took the ground that women were already enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment. The House minority report in 1871, signed by Benjamin F. Butler and William Loughridge, held that view. It is an able, unanswerable argument on the whole question, based on the oft-repeated principles of the Republican party at that time. It stands to-day a living monument of the grossest inconsistencies of which the Republican party ever was guilty.76 ...
We can not play fast and loose with the eternal principle of justice without being caught sooner or later in the net of our own weaving. The legitimate results of the war have been all frittered away by political maneuvering. While Northern statesmen have made a football of the rights of 12,000,000 women as voters, and by Supreme Court decisions driven them from the polls, why arraign the men in the South for treating 1,000,000 freedmen in the same way? Are the rights of that class of citizens more sacred than ours? Are the violations of the fundamental principles of our Government in their case more dangerous than in ours?...
In addressing those who already enjoy the right of suffrage, one naturally would suppose that it would not be necessary to enlarge on the advantages of having a voice in deciding the laws and the rulers under which one lives. And neither would it if each member of this committee understood that woman's wants and needs are similar to his own; that the cardinal virtues belong to her as well as to him; that personal dignity, the power of self-protection, are as important for her as for him; that woman loves justice, equality, liberty, and wishes the right to give her consent to the Government under which she lives, as much as man does. Matthew Arnold says: "The first desire of every cultured mind is to take part in the great work of government." ...
If we would rouse new respect for womanhood in the hearts of the masses, we must place woman in a position to respect herself, which she can never do as long as her political status is beneath that of the most degraded, ignorant classes of men. To make women the political equals of their sons, or even of their gardeners and coachmen, would add new dignity to their position; and to change our laws and constitutions in harmony with the new status would have its influence on the large class of young men now devoting themselves to the study of the law. Lord Brougham said long ago that the Common Law of England for women, and all the statutes based on such principles, were a disgrace to the Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century. Do you think our sons can rise from such studies with a high ideal of womanhood? And with what feelings do you suppose women themselves read these laws, and the articles in the State constitutions, rating them with the disreputable and feeble-minded classes? Can you not understand the dignity, the pride, the new-born self-respect which would thrill the hearts of the women of this nation in their enfranchisement? It would elevate their sphere of action and every department of labor in which they are occupied; it would give new force to their words as teachers, reformers and missionaries, new strength to their work as guardians of the young, the wayward and the unfortunate. It would transform them from slaves to sovereigns, crowned with the rights of citizenship, with the ballot, that scepter of power, in their own right hands....
If there are any who do not wish to vote, that is the strongest reason for their enfranchisement. If all love of liberty has been quenched in their souls by their degraded condition, the duties of citizenship and the responsibility of self-government should be laid upon them at once, for their pitiful indifference is merely the result of their disfranchisement. Would that I could awake in the minds of my countrywomen the full significance of this demand for the right of suffrage; what it is to be queens in their own right, intrusted with the power of self-government, possessed of all the privileges and immunities of American citizens....
Whoever heard of an heir apparent to a throne in the Old World abdicating her rights because some conservative politician or austere bishop doubted woman's capacity to govern? History affords no such example. Those who have had the right to a throne have invariably taken possession of it and, against intriguing