to regulate cannot be to annihilate! nor to qualify to wholly deprive.  And to this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for EQUAL RIGHTS TO ALL from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked that Senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote—­as he had done for black men—­he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said: 

“Miss Anthony, put ‘sex’ where I have ‘race’ or ‘color,’ and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman.  There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a sixteenth amendment to guarantee it to them.  I voted for both the fourteenth and fifteenth under protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts.  But the newly made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to wait that slow process.  Women possess all these in an eminent degree, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta, to protect every citizen of the Republic.  But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Summer’s counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen’s right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them—­they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally.”

Senator Sumner, putting sex where he did color, said: 

“Qualifications cannot be in their nature permanent or insurmountable.  Sex cannot be a qualification any more than size, race, color, or previous condition of servitude.  A permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the suffrage.  In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without representation, against which our revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled.”

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land.  By it, the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.  To them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed.  To them this government is not a democracy.  It is not a republic.  It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful obligarchy of sex.  The most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe.  An obligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an obligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an obligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this obligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the obligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.  And this most odious aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, of Article 4, which says: