Mrs. HOWELL.  Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee:  Miss Anthony gives me five minutes.  I shall have to talk very rapidly.  I ask you for the ballot because of the very first principle that is often repeated to you, that “taxation without representation is tyranny.”  I come from the city of Albany, where many of my sisters are taxed for millions of dollars.  There are three or four women in the city of Albany who are worth their millions, and yet they have no voice in the laws that govern and control them.  One of our great State senators has said that you can not argue five minutes against woman suffrage without repudiating every principle that this great Republic is founded upon.

I ask you also for the ballot for the large class of women who are not taxed.  They need it more than the women who are taxed, I have found in every work that I have conducted that because I am a woman I am not paid for that work as a man is paid for similar work.

You have heard, and perhaps some of you are thinking—­I hope not—­that women should be at home.  I wish to say to you that there are millions of women in the United States who have no homes.  There are millions of women who are trying to earn their bread and hold their purity sacred.  For that class of women I appeal to you.  In the city of Albany there are hundreds of women in our factories making the shirts that you can buy for $1.50 and $2, and all those women are paid for making the shirts is 4 cents apiece.  There are in the State of New York 18,000 teachers.  When I was a teacher and taught with gentlemen in our academies, I received about one-fourth of the pay because I happened to be a woman.  I consider it an insult that forever burns in my soul, that I am to be handed a mere pittance in comparison with what man receives for same quality of work.  When I was sent out by our superintendent of public instruction to hold conventions of teachers, as I have often done in our State of New York, and when I did one-third more work than the men teachers so sent out, but because I was a woman and had not the ballot, I was only paid about half as much as the man; and saying that once to our superintendent of public instruction in Albany, he said, “Mrs. Howell, just as soon as you get the ballot and have a political influence in the work you will have the same pay as a man.”

We ask for the ballot for that great army of fallen women who walk our streets and who break up our homes and ruin our husbands and our dear boys.  We ask it for those women.  The ballot will lift them up.  Hundreds and thousands of women give up their purity for the sake of starving children and families.  There is many a woman who goes to a life of degradation and pollution shedding burning tears over her 4-cent shirts.

We ask for the ballot for the good of the race, Huxley says, “admitting for the sake of argument that woman is the weaker, mentally