Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/462

 occasion its speakers discussed only the amendment. Mrs. Colby introduced first Representative Frank W. Mondell of Wyoming, who always was ready to champion the cause of woman suffrage for every organization. He made the point among others that "as State after State grants the franchise to women the condition is reached where its denial in other States deprives American citizens of a sacred right if they have moved from one commonwealth to another." "Our Federal Union," he said, "will be more firmly cemented the nearer we come to the point where qualifications for this right of citizenship are the same in all States." In Mrs. Colby's comprehensive address she said:

It may be news to some of you that we have had 12 reports on the woman suffrage amendment from committees of Congress. In 1869 the first hearing was given on woman suffrage and from that time to the present every Congress has had one

Never were there such splendid women in the records of time as those who have stood for the rights of their sex and the rights of humanityAll those women passed on without being allowed to enter the promised land and for every one of them one hundred sprang up for whom the doors of opportunity and education had been opened by the efforts of those pioneer women. Now these also are coming to gray hairs and weariness, but for every one of these hundreds there are a thousand of the 2oth century insisting that this question shall be settled now and not be passed on to the children of tomorrow to hamper and limit them, to exhaust and consume their energy and ability.

I was present at the last hearing where Mrs. Stanton spoke before a Judiciary Committee, and she said: "I have stood before this committee for thirty years, may I be allowed to sit now?"Miss Anthony before a committee in 1884 said: "This method of settling the matter by the Legislatures is just as much in the line of State's rights as is that of the popular vote. The one question before you is: Will you insist that a majority of the individual men of every State must be converted before its women shall have the power to vote, or will you allow the matter to be settled by the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States? We are not appealing from the States to the nation. We are appealing to the States, but to the picked men of those States instead of to the masses." She used to say when John Morrissey, champion of the prize ring, was in the New York Legislature, that it was bad enough to go and ask him to give her her birthright but it was infinitely worse to go down into the slums and ask his constituents

Mrs. Colby closed with an extract from one of Mrs. Stanton's eloquent speeches before the Judiciary Committee and submitted