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jury service and the right of suffrage. The question as to who shall perform jury service, who shall perform military service, who shall perform civil official duty, is certainly a matter to be regulated by the community itself; but the question of the right to participate in the formation of a government which controls the life, the property and the destinies of its citizens, I contend is one which goes back of these mere regulations for the protection of property and the punishment of offenses under the laws. It is a matter of right which it is a tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.

Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying, God speed the day when not only in all the States of the Union and in all the Territories, but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance—not only in respect to the right of suffrage but in every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.

Senator Vest then entered into a long and elaborate discussion of the resolution, in which he said:

Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular government based on the will of the people as expressed through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so. If this government which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature or corrupt suffrage. If the Ship of State launched by our fathers shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with this privilege it is fixed, accomplished and eternal.^[1]

The Senator who spoke last on this question refers to the successful experiment in regard to woman suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming and Washington. It is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely-settled regions of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history. Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities? Where are the localities in which the strain upon popular government must come?

The Senator from New Hampshire, who is so conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months since by his ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States. .... He proposes to give the negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly unprepared as they are for it. In a convention some two-years

1. This does not seem to apply to negro suffrage in the Southern States.