Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States, eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 236 pages of information about Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,.

Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States, eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 236 pages of information about Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,.
MISS ANTHONY.  I was coming to that, I was going to say to all of you men in office here to-day that if you can not go forward and carry out either your Democratic or your Republican or your Greenback theories, for instance, on the finance, there is no great political power that is going to take you away from these halls and prevent you from doing all those other things which you want to do, and you can act out your own moral and intellectual convictions on this without let or hindrance.

    SENATOR EDMUNDS.  Without any danger to the public interests, you
    mean.

    MISS ANTHONY.  Without any danger to the public interests.  I did
    not mean to make a bad insinuation.  Senator.

I want to give you another reason why we appeal to you.  In these three States where the question has been submitted and voted down we can not get another Legislature to resubmit it, because they say the people have expressed their opinion and decided no, and therefore nobody with any political sense would resubmit the question.  It is therefore impossible in any one of those States.  We have tried hard in Kansas for ten years to get the question resubmitted; the vote of that State seems to be taken as a finality.  We ask you to lift the sixteenth amendment out of the arena of the public mass into the arena of thinking legislative brains, the brains of the nation, under the law and the Constitution.  Not only do we ask it for that purpose, but when you will have by a two-thirds vote submitted the proposition to the several Legislatures, you have put the pin down and it never can go back.  No subsequent Congress can revoke that submission of the proposition; there will be so much gained; it can not slide back.  Then we will go to New York or to Pennsylvania and urge upon the Legislatures the ratification of that amendment.  They may refuse; they may vote it down the first time.  Then we will go to the next Legislature, and the next Legislature, and plead and plead, from year to year, if it takes ten years.  It is an open question to every Legislature until we can get one that will ratify it, and when that Legislature has once voted and ratified it no subsequent legislation can revoke their ratification.
Thus, you perceive, Senators, that every step we would gain by this sixteenth amendment process is fast and not to be done over again.  That is why I appeal to you especially.  As I have shown you in the respective States, if we fail to educate the people of a whole State—­and in Michigan it was only six months, and in Colorado less than six months—­the State Legislatures say that is the end of it.  I appeal to you, therefore, to adopt the course that we suggest.
Gentlemen of the committee, if there is a question that you want to ask me before I make my final appeal, I should like to have you put it now; any question as to constitutional law or your
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Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States, from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.