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Rh The congressional action throughout this session proves that if all the friends of woman suffrage had been steadfast to their principles, and made a simultaneous effort against any further extension of "manhood suffrage" until woman too was recognized, the measure might have been carried; at least the agitation could have been prolonged and intensified in the halls of legislation fourfold. But in the general confusion as to what might or might not be sound policy, the most liberal took each onward step with doubt and hesitation. However, the persistent hostility to the amendments kept up the agitation in Congress, which at last culminated in a proposition for a Sixteenth Amendment, for which the National Woman Suffrage Association has, with one short interval, ever since petitioned.

.—March 15, 1869, will be held memorable in all coming time as the day when the Hon. George W. Julian submitted a "Joint Resolution" to Congress to enfranchise the women of the Republic by proposing a Sixteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which reads as follows:

Since our famous Bill of Rights was given to the world declaring all men equal, there has been no other proposition, in its magnitude, beneficence, and far-reaching consequences, so momentous as this. The specific work now before us, is to press the importance of this Amendment on the consideration of the people, and to urge Congress to its speedy adoption. Suffrage associations should be formed at once and newspapers established in every State to press Woman's Enfranchisement, and petitions should be circulated in every school district from Maine to California, praying the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, that when the Forty-second Congress assembles it may understand the work before it.—The Revolution, April 29, 1869.

Petitions for a Sixteenth Amendment were immediately printed and sent throughout the nation, and have been steadily rolling into Congress for the last thirteen years from all the State and National Woman Suffrage Associations. The Fortieth Congress was the first in which an amendment to the National Constitution in the interests of woman was ever proposed. In a series of editorials in The Revolution there was a decided expression of hostility towards the Fifteenth Amendment during all the time it was pending in Congress. In the issue of October 21, 1869, Mrs. Stanton said:

All wise women should oppose the Fifteenth Amendment for two reasons. 1st. Because it is invidious to their sex. Look at it from what point you will,