that the general government will never intervene in her behalf, because it has placed women outside its Constitution and beyond its jurisdiction. The National government* protects the rights

"Wherever American women use the ballot, it is as a privilege and not as a right, as its use is not protected by the Constitution of the United States. Men can take that privilege away from women on account of their sex, whenever so inclined. The right of male citizens to vote is, on the other hand, protected by the constitution, and no State can take that right away. The States can affix qualifications (qualifications mean requirements which a little time or effort can overcome). But the right to vote cannot be permanently taken away. The State may regulate, but not prohibit, the right of a male to vote. Had Congress intended to secure to the women of the nation equal rights and protection with the men, the word "male" would never have been inserted in the National Constitution."-From a speech by the Hon. J. L. Routt, three times Governor of Colorado.

"Sex cannot be a qualification-any standard that could be required by any State, either physical, mental, financial or educational, as a qualification for the exercise of the right of suffrage, can be met by a very great number of women (to the exclusion of many men), but to make of sex (an unsurmountable thing) a requirement for the use of the ballot, is a piece of arrogant despotism that no monarch ever arrogated to himself."-Mrs. L. D. Blake.

of every male citizen beneath its flag and it leaves all the women absolutely without its protection or recognition and at the mercy of the States. Thus our Republic, after due and mature deliberation, purposely robbed its women of every right, and left them merely the possessors of precarious privileges which they must gain and retain as favors (and not as rights), just as women in any despotism gain and retain favors and privileges."

"The very basic principle of our Republic

the very foundation upon which it stands is the right to individual representation. Yet when a woman asks the government to live up to its principles, she is insultingly told that when all women ask for the ballot it will be granted. We have a law that murder shall be punished. Now suppose when a woman is murdered the court should announce that the murderer would be released untried; and when the murdered woman's mother should appear to plead for justice and to demand the enforcement of the law, the court should say: "Yes, madam, the law says that a murderer shall be punished, but as all the women

in our jurisdiction have not individually demanded that the law be enforced, we cannot extend its benefits and protection in your case, and we cannot punish this murderer until every member of your sex comes to court to make that demand." No intelligent man denies that the American "woman has no rights which men are bound to respect" and that "she is a woman without a country." American men generally assert that no race, class, or nation can be trusted to legislate fairly and intelligently for another race, class or nation-that even fathers, sons, brothers, can never legislate fairly and intelligently for their own fathers, sons and brothers; and yet they presume to legislate for another sex, for a creature of a different creation; for a creature whose character and characteristics are as different from those of man as if she were of a different world! The world's great advocates of democracy have all started out by believing that therein woman would be given greater opportunities in every respect than is given her in other forms of government. But the very reverse of this has happened upon practical ex

periment, for instead of woman even retaining the public power and recognition which she has in Christian monarchies, she is gradually sinking in all such respects in every republic, to Oriental obscurity and insignificance and besides she has practically lost thereby about all the civic and many of the strictly social opportunities which her sex possesses in aristocracies. It breaks my heart to confess this even to myself. Let intelligent womanhood ever discover these facts and the death knell of democracy will reverberate throughout the world."

When the fifteenth amendment was added to the Constitution of the Republic, giving millions of male African ex-slaves the ballot, J. S. Mill said: "It is not to be believed that a nation which admits negroes to the plenitude of all political power, will still retain woman in a state of helotage, which is more degrading to her than ever, because being no longer shared by any of the male sex it constitutes every woman in the land the inferior of every man." After placing the female sex under the heels of criminals, peasants and incapables from every part

of the globe, the government added farther insult to injury by placing it under the dominion of the lowest race and order of manhood-the African!

You cannot inquire into the history of the Republic without agreeing with me that there were never greater acts of tyranny, vanity, selfishness or arrogance, than were committed by the male founders thereof, when they enacted provisions securing to themselves all self-governing rights, protections and recognitions, and left the entire female population practically without any national rights, recognitions or protections whatsoever. The explanations that are offered in extenuation thereof are identical with, and differ in no single particular from those offered by the worst despots of history for their unjust assumptions of power. Nor can there be found, either in Pagan or Christian annals, the records of acts of infamy equal to those of their successors, ostracising their own countrywomen, outlawing them with savages and subjecting them to the government of outside barbarians. "Not since God called light out of darkness,