Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/122

92 and the twentieth by the nineteenth, the world will always be governed by dead men. . ..

The cry of centralization could have little significance if the constitution were so amended as to protect all United States citizens in their inalienable rights. That national supremacy that holds individual freedom and equality more sacred than State rights and secures representation to all classes of people, is a very different form of centralization from that in which all the forces of society are centered in a single arm. But the recognition of the principle of national supremacy, as declared in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, has been practically nullified and the results of the war surrendered, by remanding woman to the States for the protection of her civil and political rights. The Supreme Court decisions and the congressional reports on this point are in direct conflict with the idea of national unity, and the principle of States rights involved in this discussion must in time remand all United States citizens alike to State authority for the protection of those rights declared to inhere in the people at the foundation of the government.

You may listen to our demands, gentlemen, with dull ears, and smile incredulously at the idea of danger to our institutions from continued violation of the civil and political rights of women, but the question of what citizens shall enjoy the rights of suffrage involves our national existence; for, if the constitutional rights of the humblest citizen may be invaded with impunity, laws interpreted on the side of injustice, judicial decisions based not on reason, sound argument, nor the spirit and letter of our declarations and theories of government, but on the customs of society and what dead men are supposed to have thought, not what they said—what will the rights of the ruling powers even be in the future with a people educated into such modes of thought and action? The treatment of every individual in a community—in our courts, prisons, asylums, of every class of petitioners before congress—strengthens or undermines the foundations of that temple of liberty whose corner-stones were laid one century ago with bleeding hands and anxious hearts, with the hardships, privations, and sacrifices of a seven years' war. He who is able from the conflicts of the present to forecast the future events, cannot but contemplate with anxiety the fate of this republic, unless our constitution be at once subjected to a thorough emendation, making it more comprehensively democratic.

A review of the history of our nation during the century will show the American people that all the obstacles that have impeded their political, moral and material progress from the dominion of slavery down to the present epidemic of political corruptions, are directly and indirectly traceable to the federal constitution as their source and support. Hence the necessity of prompt and appropriate amendments. Nothing that is incorrect in principle can ever be productive of beneficial results, and no custom or authority is able to alter or overrule this inviolate law of development. The catch-phrases of politicians, such as "organic development," "the logic of events," and "things will regulate themselves," have deceived the thoughtless long enough. There is just one road to safety,