idiot. the pauper, Indians not taxed, the criminal, and the unnaturalized foreigner.
Honorable gentlemen, women come here annually to ask that these wrongs be righted. To-day we have come again to entreat that, as you have extended this building to meet the needs of the people, you will extend your thought of the people and make it possible that the principle underlying the Government of this country may be embodied in a law which will make the daughters of the land joint heirs with the sons to all the rights and privileges of an enfranchised people. In the name of the women of the State of New York, I ask it.
Miss Alice Stone Blackwell (Mass.): Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner? Let us consider a few of the reasons which are generally given against this freedom of women, and see whether they are good.
It is said that women do not need to vote, because they are virtually represented by their husbands, fathers and brothers. The first trouble with this doctrine of virtual representation is that it is not according to numbers. I know a man who had a wife, a widowed mother, four unmarried daughters and five unmarried sisters. According to this theory his vote represented himself and all those eleven women. Yet it counted but one, just the same as the vote of his next-door bachelor neighbor without a female relative in the world.
Then, again, suppose that all the women in one family do not think alike. A member of our Massachusetts Legislature had two daughters. One was a suffragist, the other was so much opposed that she used to burn the Woman's Journal as soon as it came in the house. How was that man to represent both his daughters by his single vote on the suffrage question? Instead of two daughters he might have had three, one a Republican, one a Democrat and the other a Prohibitionist. How could he have represented all of them by his one vote unless he had voted "early and often?"
Again, in order to represent the women of his family a man may have to go without representation himself. There was a case of an old gentleman in Chicago, a Greenbacker, who had three daughters, all of whom were Republicans. When election day approached his three daughters said to him that he was the natural representative of their family—he had always told them so, and they fully agreed with him—and they pointed out to him how very wrong it would be, when that family consisted of three Republicans and only one Greenbacker, with but one ballot to represent the family, that it should be cast for the Greenback candidate. The old gentleman was conscientious and consistent and, although he was a man of strong Green-
