right to go forward.  Of course you do not deny to us that this amendment will be right in the line of all the amendments heretofore.  The eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth amendments are all in line prohibiting the States from doing something which they heretofore thought they had a right to do.  Now we ask you to prohibit the States from denying to women their rights.

I want to show you in closing that of the great acts of justice done during the war and since the war the first one was a great military necessity.  We never got one inch of headway in putting down the rebellion until the purpose of this great nation was declared that slavery should he abolished.  Then, as if by magic, we went forward and put down the rebellion.  At the close of the rebellion the nation stood again at a perfect deadlock.  The Republican party was trembling in the balance, because it feared that it could not hold its position, until it should have secured by legislation to the Government what it had gained at the point of the sword, and when the nation declared its purpose to enfranchise the negro it was a political necessity.  I do not want to take too much vainglory out of the heads of Republicans, but nevertheless it is a great national fact that neither of those great acts of beneficence to the negro race was done because of any high, overshadowing moral conviction on the part of any considerable minority even of the people of this nation, but simply because of a military necessity slavery was abolished, and simply because of a political necessity black men were enfranchised.

The blackest Republican State you had voted down negro suffrage, and that was Kansas in 1867; Michigan voted it down in 1867; Ohio voted it down in 1867.  Iowa was the only State that ever voted negro suffrage by a majority of the citizens to which the question was submitted, and they had not more than seventy-five negroes in the whole State; so it was not a very practical question.  Therefore, it may be fairly said, I think, that it was a military necessity that compelled one of those acts of justice, and a political necessity that compelled the other.

It seems to me that from the first word uttered by our dear friend, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, of Indiana, all the way down, we have been presenting to you the fact that there is a great moral necessity pressing upon this nation to-day, that you shall go forward and attach a sixteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution which shall put in the hands of the women of this nation the power to help make, shape, and control the social conditions of society everywhere.  I appeal to you from that standpoint that you shall submit this proposition.

There is one other point to which I want to call your attention.  The Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator EDMUNDS chairman, reported that the United States could do nothing to protect women