Mrs. Gougar.  Gentlemen, we are here on behalf of the women citizens of this Republic, asking for political freedom.  I maintain that there is no political question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day.  Political parties would fain have us believe that tariff is the great question of the hour.  Political parties know better.  It is an insult to the intelligence of the present hour to say that when one-half of the citizens of this Republic are denied a direct voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that tariff, or that the civil rights of the negro, or any other question that can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women.  So I come to ask you, as representative men, making laws to govern the women the same as the men of this country (and there is not a law that you make in the United States Congress in which woman has not an equal interest with man), to take the word “male” out of the constitutions of the United States and the several States, as you have taken the word “white” out, and give to us women a voice in the laws under which we live.

You ask me why I am inclined to be practical in my view of this question.  In the first place, speaking from my own standpoint, I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall live because the older empires of the earth are sending in upon our American shores a population drawing very largely from the asylums, yes, from the penitentiaries, the jails, and the poor-houses of the Old World.  They are emptying those men upon our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the ballot, the law-making power in this Republic, and they and their representatives are seated in official and legislative positions.  I, as an American-born woman, to-day enter my protest at being compelled to live under laws made by this class of men very largely, and myself being rendered utterly incapable of the protection that can only come from the ballot.  While I would not have you take this right or privilege from those men whom we invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

    Miss Anthony.  And foreign women, too.

Mrs. Gougar.  Miss Anthony suggests an amendment, and I indorse it most heartily, and foreign women too, because if we let a foreign man vote I say let the foreign woman vote.  I am in favor of universal suffrage.

Gentlemen, I ask this as a matter of justice; I ask it because it is an insult to the intelligence of the present to draw the sex line upon any right whatever.  I know there are many objections urged, and I am sure that you have considered this question; but I only make the demand from the standpoint, not of sex, but of humanity.

As a Northern woman, as a woman from