Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/247

Rh In a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, dated Concord, April 20, 1867, Parker Pillsbury, under the title, "The Face of the Sky," says:

I have just read in the papers of last week what follows:

Mr. Phillips, in the Anti-Slavery Standard says: "All our duty is to press constantly on the nation the absolute need of three things. 1st. The exercise of the whole police power of the government while the seeds of republicanism get planted. 2d. The Constitutional Amendment securing universal suffrage in spite of all State Legislation. 3d. A Constitutional Amendment authorizing Congress to establish common schools, etc. To these necessaries," Mr. Phillips adds, "we must educate the public mind."

Mr. Greeley in the Tribune says: "We are most anxious that our present State Constitution shall be so amended as to secure prompt justice through

variance with the divine code, is essentially unrighteous and unjust. Woman and the colored man are taxed to support many literary and humane institutions, into which they never come, except in the poorly paid capacity of menial servants. Women has been fined, whipped, branded with red-hot irons, imprisoned and hung; but when was woman ever tried by a jury of her peers?

Though the nation declared from the beginning that "all just governments derive their power from the consent of the governed," the consent of woman was never asked to a single statute, however nearly it affected her dearest womanly interests or happiness. In the despotisms of the old world, of ancient and modern times, woman, profligate, prostitute, weak, cruel, tyrannical, or otherwise, from Semiramis and Messalina, to Catherine of Russia and Margaret of Anjou, have swayed, unchallenged, imperial scepters; while in this republican and Christian land in the nineteenth century, woman, intelligent, refined in every ennobling gift and grace, may not even vote on the appropriation of her own property, or the disposal and destiny of her own children. Literally she has no rights which man is bound to respect; and her civil privileges she holds only by sufferance. For the power that gave, can take away, and of that power she is no part. In most of the States, these unjust distinctions apply to woman, and to the colored man alike. Your Memorialists fully believe that the time has come when such injustice should cease.

Woman and the colored man are loyal, patriotic, property-holding, tax-paying, liberty loving citizens; and we can not believe that sex or complexion should be any ground for civil or political degradation. In our government, one-half the citizens are disfranchised by their sex, and about one-eighth by the color of their skin; and thus a large majority have no voice in enacting or executing the laws they are taxed to support and compelled to obey, with the same fidelity as the more favored class, whose usurped prerogative it is to rule, Against such outrages on the very name of republican freedom, your memorialists do and must ever protest. And is not our protest pre-eminently as just against the tyranny of taxation without representation, ag was that thundered from Bunker Hill, when our revolutionary fathers fired the shot that shook the world?

And your Memorialists especially remember, at this time, that our country is still reeling under the shock of a terrible civil war, the legitimate result and righteous retribution of the vilest slave system ever suffered among men. And in restoring the foundations of our nationality, your memorialists most respectfully and earnestly pray that all discriminations on account of sex or race may be removed; and that our Government may be republican in fact as well as form; A GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE, AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE; FOR THE PEOPLE, AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE.

In behalf of the American Equal Rights Association,