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to protect the liberty of the republic. Is not this symbol a mockery while the women of the country are held in political slavery? We ask you to insist that the pledges of the republic shall be redeemed, that its promises shall be fulfilled, and that American womanhood shall be enfranchised.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (N. Y.), as had been her custom during all the years since she had ceased to appear in person before these committees, sent a strong appeal for justice, beginning as follows:

In adjusting the rights of citizens in our newly-acquired possessions, the whole question of suffrage is again fairly open for discussion in the House of Representatives; and as some of the States are depriving the colored men of the exercise of this right and all of the States, except four, deny it to all women, I ask Congress to submit an amendment to the National Constitution declaring that citizens not allowed a voice in the Government shall not be taxed or counted in the basis of representation.

To every fair mind, such an amendment would appear pre-eminently just, since to count disfranchised classes in the basis of representation compels citizens to aid in swelling the number of Congressmen who may legislate against their most sacred interests. If the Southern States that deny suffrage to negro men should find that it limited their power in Congress by counting in the basis of representation only those citizens who vote, they would see that the interests of the races lay in the same direction. A constitutional amendment to this effect would also rouse the Northern States to their danger, for the same rule applied there in excluding all women from the basis of representation would reduce the number of their members of Congress one-half. And if the South should continue her suicidal policy toward women as well as colored men, her States would be at a still greater disadvantage. ....

By every principle of our republic, logically considered, woman's emancipation is a foregone conclusion. The great "declarations," by the fathers, regarding individual rights and the true foundations of government, should not be glittering generalities for demagogues to quote and ridicule, but eternal laws of justice, as fixed in the world of morals as are the laws of attraction and gravitation in the material universe.

In regard to the injustice of taxing unrepresented classes, Lord Coke says: "The supreme power can not take from any man his property without his consent in person or by representation. The very act of taxing those who are not represented appears to me to deprive them of one of their most sacred rights as free men, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right; for what one civil right is worth a rush when a man's property is subject to be taken from him without his consent?

Woman's right to life, liberty and happiness, to education, prop-