Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/80

50 penalty of her legal bonds in any case is due to the fact that the majority of men, married or single, are notably better than their laws.

Our fathers taught the quality and initiated the form of free government. But it was left to their posterity to learn from the discipline of experience, that truths, old as the eternities, are forever revealing new phases to render possible more perfect interpretations; and to accumulate unanswerable reasons for their extended application. That the sorest trials and most appreciable failures of the government our fathers bequeathed, to us, have been the direct and inevitable results of their departures from the principles they enunciated, is so patent to all Christendom, that free government itself has won from our mistakes material to revolutionize the world—lessons that compel depotisms to change their base and constitutional monarchies to make broader the phylacteries of popular rights.

Is it not meet then, that on this one-hundredth anniversary of American independence the daughters of revolutionary sires should appeal to the sons to fulfill what the fathers promised but failed to perform—should appeal to them as the constituted executors of the father's will, to give full practical effect to the self-evident truths, that "taxation without representation is tyranny"—that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed"? With an evident common interest in all the affairs of which government properly or improperly takes cognizance, we claim enfranchisement on the broad ground of human right, having proved the justice of our claim by the injustice which has resulted to us and ours through our disfranchisement.

We ask enfranchisement in the abiding faith that with our coöperative efforts free government would attain to higher averages of intelligence and virtue; with an innate conviction, that the sequestration of rights in the homes of the republic makes them baneful nurseries of the monopolies, rings, and fraudulent practices that are threatening the national integrity; and that so long as the fathers sequester the rights of the mothers and train their sons to exercise, and the daughters to submit to the exactions of usurped powers, our government offices will be dens of thieves and the national honor trail in the dust; and honest men come out from the fiery ordeals of faithful service, denuded of the confidence and respect justly their due. Give us liberty! We are mothers, wives, and daughters of freemen.

2em

, Eng., July 4, 1876.

I sincerely thank you for your kind letter. Many times I have thought of writing to you, but I knew your time was too much taken up with the good cause to have any to spare for private correspondence. Occasionally I am pleased to see a good account of you and your doings in the Boston Investigator. Oh, how I wish I could be with you on this more than ordinarily interesting and important occasion; or that I could at least send my sentiments and views on human rights, which I have advocated for over forty years, to the convention.

This being the centenary day of the proclamation of American independence, I must write a few lines, if but to let the friends know that