Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/49

Rh of government, woman's demand for political equality received a new impulse. The famous Smith sisters, of Glastonbury, Connecticut, attended this convention, and were most cordially welcomed. The officers for the centennial year were chosen and a campaign and congressional committee appointed to take charge of affairs at Philadelphia and Washington. The resolutions show the general drift of the discussions:

, The right of self-government inheres in the individual before governments are founded, constitutions framed, or courts created; and

, Governments exist to protect the people in the enjoyment of their natural rights, and when any government becomes destructive of this end, it is the right of the people to resist and abolish it; and

The women of the United States, for one hundred years, have been denied the exercise of their natural right of self-government and self-protection; therefore,

Resolved, That it is the natural right and most sacred duty of the women of these United States to rebel against the injustice, usurpation and tyranny of our present government.

, The men of 1776 rebelled against a government which did not claim to be of the people, but, on the contrary, upheld the "divine right of kings"; and

The women of this nation to-day, under a government which claims to be based upon individual rights, to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people," in an infinitely greater degree are suffering all the wrongs which led to the war of the revolution; and