Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/748

714 to the jury, and because the court assumed to itself the right to enter a verdict without submitting the case to the jury, and in order that the judgment of the House of Representatives, if it concur with the judgment of the committee, may, in the most signal and impressive form, mark its determination to sustain in its integrity the common-law right of trial by jury, your committee recommend that the prayer of the petitioner be granted, and to this end report the following bill, with the recommendation that it do pass.

The Inspectors were counseled to refuse to pay their fines, and take the consequences.

, Washington, Feb. 22, 1874.


 * —In regard to the Inspectors of Election, I would not, if I were they, pay, but allow any process to be served; and I have no doubt the President will remit the fine if they are pressed too far.

I am yours truly,

On Miss Anthony's return home, February 26, 1874, she found the three Inspectors lodged in jail. She at once called on Judge Selden, and after consultation with him as to what could be done for their protection, telegrams were sent to influential friends in Washington, to which the following reply was received:

D. C., March 2, 1874—12 noon.

—I laid the case of the Inspectors before the President to-day. He kindly orders their pardon. Papers are being prepared.

2em

An Associated Press dispatch, dated Washington, March 2, 1874, said:

At the written request of Senator Sargent, the President to-day directed the Attorney-General to prepare the necessary papers to remit the fine and imprisonment of Hall, Marsh, and others, the Rochester Election Inspectors, who were tried and convicted in June, 1873, of registering Susan B. Anthony and other women, and receiving their votes.

The Rochester Evening Express of Feb. 26, 1874, said:

—The arrest and imprisonment in our city jail of the Election Inspectors who received the votes of Susan B. Anthony and other ladies, at the polls of the Eighth Ward, some months ago, is a petty but malicious act of tyranny, of which the officers who are responsible for it will yet be ashamed. It should be known to the public that these young men received Miss Anthony's vote by the advice of the best legal talent that could be procured. The ladies themselves took oath that they were citizens of the United States and entitled to vote.... The Court, however, fined these inspectors $25 and costs, for an offense which at the worst is merely technical, and now, nearly nine months after conviction, in default of payment, they are seized and shut up in jail, away from their families and their business, and subjected to all the inconvenience to say nothing of the odium of such an incarceration. This is an outrage which ought