Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/104

 sally recognized and impartially administered, and the civil and political errors of the past effectually repaired. Whoever admits that men have a right to the franchise must include in the admission women also, for there are no reasons capable of demonstrating an abstract right in behalf of one sex which are not equally applicable to the other.

The assertion that women do not want to vote is absolutely without authority, so long as each individual woman does not speak out for herself. In Ohio 225,000, and in Illinois 185,000, have signified a desire to use the ballot for home protection, and yet it is still asserted in those States that women do not want it. Over 100,000 women have already notified this Congress that they desire equality of political rights, and still it is declared all around us that women do not want to vote. Gentlemen, this is most emphatically an assertion which no individual can be justified in making for another.

Since the elective franchise is the parent stem from which branch out legal, industrial, social and educational enterprises necessary to the welfare of the citizens, it will be readily seen how women engaged in reforms, public charities, social enterprises, are hampered and trammeled in their progress without the ballot. Women have beheld their plans frustrated, their Herculean labor undone, their lives wasted, for want of legislative power through the citizen’s emblem of sovereignty.

All ranks and occupations are beginning to realize that monstrous evils must ever crowd upon both classes while one side of humanity only is represented, and while one sex has the irresponsible keeping of the rights and privileges of the other. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of our land, woman finds the greatest need of the ballot through an almost overpowering desire to have her wishes and opinions crystallized into law.

I have no hesitancy in saying that if the conditions which surround the women of this nation to-day were the conditions of the male citizens of the country, they would rise up and pronounce them the exact definition of civil and political slavery, instead of the true interpretation of natural justice and civil equity.

Many persons claim that men are born with the right to vote, as they are to the right of life, liberty and happiness; that suffrage is the gift of the State, and that the State has a right to regulate it in any way that it may deem best for the common good. If men are born with the right to life, liberty and happiness, they are also born with the right to give expression as to how these are to be maintained ; and in this nation, which professes to rest upon the consent of the governed, this expression is given through the ballot. Consequently the expression of a freeman’s will is as God-given as his right to be free. Since the year of Magna Charta we have repudiated the idea of representation by proxy.

We all know that there are thousands of women in this nation who are owners of property, mothers of children, devoted to their homes and families and to all the duties and responsibilities which grow out of social life, and hence are most deeply interested