MISS ANTHONY.  You are not laughing at me; you are treating me
    respectfully, because you are hearing my argument; you are not
    asleep, not one of you, and I am delighted.

Now, I am going to tell you one other fact.  Seven thousand of the best citizens of Illinois petitioned the Legislature of 1877 to give them the poor privilege of voting on the license question.  A gentleman presented their petition; the ladies were in the lobbies around the room.  A gentleman made a motion that the president of the State association of the Christian Temperance Union be allowed to address the Legislature regarding the petition of the memorialists, when a gentleman sprang to his feet, and said it was well enough for the honorable gentleman to present the petition, and have it received and laid on the table, but “for a gentleman to rise in his seat and propose that the valuable time of the honorable gentlemen of the Illinois Legislature should be consumed in discussing the nonsense of those women is going a little too far.  I move that the sergeant-at-arms be ordered to clear the hall of the house of representatives of the mob;” referring to those Christian women.  Now, they had had the lobbyists of the whisky ring in that Legislature for years and years, not only around it at respectful distances, but inside the bar, and nobody ever made a motion to clear the halls of the whisky mob there.  It only takes Christian women to make a mob.

MRS. SAXON.  We were treated extremely respectfully in Louisiana.  It showed plainly the temper of the convention when the present governor admitted that woman suffrage was a fact bound to come.  They gave us the privilege of having women on the school boards, but then the officers are appointed by men who are politicians.

MISS ANTHONY.  I want to read a few words that come from good authority, for black men at least.  I find here a little extract that I copied years ago from the Anti-Slavery Standard of 1870.  As you know, Wendell Phillips was the editor of that paper at that time: 

    “A man with the ballot in his hand is the master of the situation. 
    He defines all his other rights; what is not already given him he
    takes.”

    That is exactly what we want, Senators.  The rights you have not
    already given us; we want to get in such a position that we can
    take them.

“The ballot makes every class sovereign over its own fate.  Corruption may steal from a man his independence; capital may starve, and intrigue fetter him, at times; but against all these, his vote, intelligently and honestly cast, is, in the long run, his full protection.  If, in the struggle, his fort surrenders, it is only because it is betrayed from within.  No power ever permanently wronged a voting class without its own consent.”

Senators, I want to ask of you that