Did all the married women petition the Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold in their own name the property that belonged to them?  To secure to the poor forsaken wife the right to her earnings?

All the women did not ask for these rights, but all accepted them with joy and gladness when they were obtained, and so it will be with the franchise.  But woman’s right to self-government does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the same principles that man claims it for himself.

Where did man get the authority that he now claims to govern one-half of humanity, from what power the right to place woman, his helpmeet in life, in an inferior position?  Came it from nature?  Nature made woman his superior when she made her his mother—­his equal when she fitted her to hold the sacred position of wife.  Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all their claim to be their own law-makers?

    The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master.  Yes,
    then, and then only, does he gain the authority.

It is all very well to say “convert the women.”  While we most heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for if this question is settled by the States it will be left to the voters, not to the women to decide.  Or if suffrage comes to women through a sixteenth amendment of the national Constitution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men.  In neither case will women have an opportunity of passing; upon the question.  So reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of our disabilities, which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage.

The arguments in favor of the enfranchisement of women are truths strong and unanswerable, and as old as the free institutions of our Government.  The principle of “taxation without representation is tyranny” applies to women as well as men, and is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.

    Our demand for the ballot is the great onward step of the century,
    and not, as some claim, the idiosyncracies of a few unbalanced
    minds.

Every argument that has been urged against this question of woman’s suffrage has been urged against every reform.  Yet the reforms have fought their way onward and become a part of the glorious history of humanity.

So it will be with suffrage.  “You can stop the crowing of the cock, but you can not stop the dawn of the morning.”  And now, gentlemen, you are responsible, not for the laws you find on the statute books, but for those you leave there.

    REMARKS BY MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL.

    Miss ANTHONY.  I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Mary Seymour
    Howell, the president of the Albany, N.Y., State society.