prominent ministers signed it for moral purposes alone.  When Mrs. Horsey was on her dying bed the last time she ever signed her name was to a letter to go before that convention.  No one believed she would die.  Mrs. Merrick and myself went before the convention.  I was invited before the committee on the judiciary.  I made an impression favorable enough there to be invited before the convention with these ladies.  I addressed the convention.  We made the petition then that we make here; that we, the mothers of the land, are barred on every side in the cause of reform.  I have strived hard in the work of reform for women.  I pledged my father on his dying bed that I would never cease that work until woman stood with man equal before the law, so far as my efforts could accomplish it.  Finding myself baffled in that work, I could only take the course which we have adopted, and urge the proposition of the sixteenth amendment.

I beg of you, gentlemen, to consider this question apart from the manner in which it was formerly considered.  We, as the women of the nation, as the mothers, as the wives, have a right to be heard, it seems to me, before the nation.  We represent precisely the position of the colonies when they plead, and, in the words of Patrick Henry, they were “spurned with contempt from the foot of the throne.”  We have been jeered and laughed at and ridiculed; but this question has passed out of the region of ridicule.

    The moral force inheres in woman and in man alike, and unless we
    use all the moral power of the Government we certainly can not
    exist as a Government.

We talk of centralization, we talk of division; we have the seeds of decay in our Government, and unless right soon we use the moral force and bring it forward in all its strength and bearing, we certainly cannot exist as a happy nation.  We do not exist as a happy nation now.  This clamor for woman’s suffrage, for woman’s rights, for equal representation, is extending all over the land.

I plead because my work has been combatted in the cause of reform everywhere that I have tried to accomplish anything.  The children that fill the houses of prostitution are not of foreign blood and race.  They come from sweet American homes, and for every woman that went down some mother’s heart broke.  I plead by the power of the ballot to be allowed to help reform women and benefit mankind.

    REMARKS OF MRS. MARY A. STEWART, OF DELAWARE.

Mrs. STEWART.  I come from a small State, but one that is represented in this Congress, I consider, by some of the ablest men in the land.  Our State, though small, has heretofore possessed and to-day possesses brains.  Our sons have no more right to brains than our daughters, yet we are tied down by every chain that could bind the Georgian slave before the war.  Aye, we are worse slaves, because the Georgian slave could