voice in determining what should be done with what I paid.  I felt that I ought to own my own property; that it ought not to be in these men’s hands; and I now come to plead that I may have the same privileges before the law that men have.  I have seen what a difference there is, when I have had my cows sold, by having a voter to take my part.

I have come from an obscure town (I can not say that it is obscure exactly) on the banks of the Connecticut, where I was born.  I was brought up on a farm.  I never had an idea that it could be possible that I should ever come all the way to Washington to speak before those who had not come into existence when I was born.  Now, I plead that there may be a sixteenth amendment, and that women may be allowed the privilege of owning their own property.  That is what I have taken pains to accomplish.  I have suffered so much myself that I felt it might have some effect to plead before this honorable committee.  I thank you, gentlemen, for hearing me so kindly.

    REMARKS BY MRS. ELIZABETH L. SAXON, OF LOUISIANA,

Mrs. SAXON.  Gentleman, I almost feel that after Mrs. Wallace’s plea there is scarcely a necessity for me to say anything; she echoed my own feelings so entirely.  I come from the extreme South, she from the West.  In this delegation, and in the convention which has just been held in this city, women have come together who never met before.  People have asked me why I came.

I care nothing for suffrage so far as to stand beside men, or rush to the polls, or take any privilege outside of my home, only, as Mrs. Wallace says, for humanity.  Years ago, when a little child, I lost my mother, and I was brought up by a man.  If I have not a man’s brain I had at least a man’s instruction.  He taught me that to work in the cause of reform for women was just as great as to work in the cause of reform for men.  But in every effort I made in the cause of reform I was combated in one direction or another.  I never took part with the suffragists.  I never realized the importance of their cause until we were beaten back on every aide in the work of reform.  If we attempted to put women in charge of prisons, believing that wherever woman sins and suffers women should be there to teach, help, and guide, every place was in the hands of men.  If we made an effort to get women on the school boards we were combated and could do nothing.  Everyplace seemed to be changed, when there were good men in those places, by changes of politics; and the mothers of the land, having had to prostrate themselves as beggars, if not in fact, really in sentiment and feeling, have become at last almost desperate.

In the State of Texas I had a niece living whose father was an inmate of a lunatic asylum.  She exerted as wide an influence in the State of Texas as any woman there.  I allude to Miss Mollie Moore, who was the ward of Mr. Gushing.