Miss SUSAN B. ANTHONY.  Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the select committee:  This is the sixteenth time that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth annually by petitions.  Ever since the war, from the winter of 1865-’66, we have regularly sent up petitions asking for the national protection of the citizen’s right to vote when the citizen happens to be a woman.  We are here again for the same purpose.  I do not propose to speak now, but to introduce the other speakers, and at the close perhaps will state to the committee the reasons why we come to Congress.  The other speakers will give their thought from the standpoint of their respective States.  I will first introduce to the committee Mrs. Harriet R. Shattuck, of Boston, Mass.

    REMARKS BY MRS. HARRIET R. SHATTUCK.

Mrs. SHATTUCK.  Mr. Chairman and gentlemen:  It seems as if it were almost unnecessary for us to come here at this meeting, because I feel that all we have to say and all we have to claim is known to you, and we can not add anything to what has been said in the past sixteen years.

But I should like to say one thing, and that is, that in my work it has seemed that if we could convince everybody of the motives of the suffragists we would go far toward removing prejudices.  I know that those motives are very much misunderstood.  Persons think of us as ambitious women, who are desirous for fame, and who merely come forward to make speeches and get before the public, or else they think that we are unfortunate beings with no homes, or unhappy wives, who are getting our livelihood in this sort of way.  If we could convince every man who has a vote in this Republic that this is not the case, I believe we could go far toward removing the prejudice against us.  If we could make them see that we are working here merely because we know that the cause is right, and we feel that we must work for it, that there is a power outside of ourselves which impels us onward, which says to us:  go forward and speak to the people and try to bring them up to a sense of their duty and of our right.  This is the belief that I have in regard to our position on this question.  It is a matter of duty with us, and that is all.

In Massachusetts I represent a very much larger number of women than is supposed.  It has always been said that very few women wish to vote.  Believing that this objection, although it has nothing to do with the rights of the cause, ought to be met, the association of which I am president inaugurated last year a sort of canvass, which I believe never had been attempted before, whereby we obtained the proportion of women in favor and opposed to suffrage in different localities of our State.  We took four localities in the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, and two in the country districts, and one also of school teachers in nine schools of one town.  Those school teachers were unanimously in favor of suffrage, and