I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens.  But the difficulty is, the courts long since decided that the constitutional provisions do not act upon the citizens, except as guarantees, ex proprio vigore, and in order to give practical force to them there must be legislation.  As, for example, in trial by jury, a man can invoke the Constitution to prevent his being tried, in a proper case, by any other tribunal than a jury; but if there is no legislation, congressional or other, to give him a trial by jury, I think, under the decisions, it would be very difficult to see how it might be done.  Therefore, the point is for the friends of woman suffrage to get congressional legislation.

[Autograph:  Benjamin F. Butler]

The results of the trial showed that General Butler was right in thinking that further legislation would be required to enable women to vote under the Constitution of the United States.  It proved also that a judge could set aside the right of a citizen to a trial by jury, supposed to be guaranteed by every safeguard which could be thrown around it by this same Constitution.

[Footnote 63:  Present, Lyman Trumbull, Illinois, chairman; Roscoe Conkling, New York; F.F.  Frelinghuysen, New Jersey; Matthew H. Carpenter, Wisconsin.]

[Footnote 64:  See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol.  II, pp. 499 and 506.]

[Footnote 65:  Susan B. Anthony, Mary S. Anthony, Guelma Anthony McLean, Hannah Anthony Mosher, Rhoda De Garmo, Sarah Truesdale, Mary Pulver, Lottie B. Anthony, Nancy M. Chapman, Susan M. Hough, Hannah Chatfield, Margaret Leyden, Mary Culver, Ellen S. Baker, Mary L. Hebard (wife of the editor of the Express).]

[Footnote 66:  When a jurist as eminent as Judge Henry R. Selden testifies that he told Miss Anthony before election that she had a right to vote, and this after a careful examination of the question, the whole subject assumes new importance....  How grateful to Judge Selden must all the suffragists be!  He has struck the strongest and most promising blow in their behalf that has yet been given.  Dred Scott was the pivot on which the Constitution turned before the war.  Miss Anthony seems likely to occupy a similar position now.—­New York Commercial Advertiser.

The arrest of the fifteen women of Rochester, and the imprisonment of the renowned Miss Susan B. Anthony, for voting at the November election, afford a curious illustration of the extent to which the United States government is stretching its hand in these matters.  If these women violated any law at all by voting, it was clearly a statute of the State of New York, and that State might safely be left to vindicate the majesty of its own laws.  It is only by an over-strained stretch of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that the national government can force its long finger into the Rochester case at all.—­New York Sun.