Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/85

 SUSAN B. ANTHONY

��citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them ; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government — the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to-pass a bill of at- tainder, or an ex post fact&Aa,\v,^-a^ is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers de- rived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex ; the most hateful aris- tocracy ever established on the face of the globe ; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oli- garchy of race, where the Saxon rules the Afri- can, might be endured ; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, tho oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household — which ordain^- 59

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