and physically, for that reason she should have the ballot and should have every help that the world can give her.”  When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality, and the love of woman then those legislative halls and those councils are apt to become coarse and brutal, God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help to make our country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have states we men to bear them.

I ask you also for the ballot that I may decide what I am.  I stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a “person” according to the law.  It has been decided in some States that we are not “persons.”  In the State of New York, in one village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants.  So I should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may become a citizen of this great Republic.

Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the South.  We are in dead earnest.  A reform never goes backward.  This is a question that is before the American nation.  Will you do your duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver hearts to do what must be done?  For, like our forefathers, we will ask until we have gained it.

    Ever the world goes round and round; Ever the truth comes
    uppermost; and ever is justice done.

    REMARKS BY MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.

Miss ANTHONY.  I now have the pleasure of introducing to the committee Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, of New York.  New York is a great State, and therefore it has three representatives here to-day.

Mrs. BLAKE.  Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee:  A recent writer in an English magazine, in speaking of the great advantage which to-day flows to the laboring classes of that nation from having received the right of suffrage, made the statement that disfranchised classes are oppressed, not because there is any desire whatever to do injustice to them, but because they are forgotten.  We have year after year and session after session of our legislatures and of our Congresses proved the correctness of this statement.  While we have nothing to complain of in the courtesy which we receive in private life, still when we see masses of men assembled together for political action, whether it be of the nation or of the State, we find that the women are totally forgotten.

In the limited time that is mine I cannot go into any lengthy exposition upon this point.  I will simply call your attention to the total forgetfulness of the Congress of the United States to the debt owed to the women of this nation during the war.  You have passed a pension bill upon