hence the Republicans have had their last chance to do justice to
woman. It will be no enviable record for the Fortieth Congress
that in the darkest days of the republic it placed our free
institutions in the care and keeping of every type of manhood,
ignoring womanhood, all the elevating and purifying influences of
the most virtuous and humane half of the American people....

I urge a speedy adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment for the
following reasons:

1. A government, based on the principle of caste and class, can
not stand. The aristocratic idea, in any form, is opposed to the
genius of our free institutions, to our own declaration of
rights, and to the civilization of the age. All artificial
distinctions, whether of family, blood, wealth, color, or sex,
are equally oppressive to the subject classes, and equally
destructive to national life and prosperity. Governments based on
every form of aristocracy, on every degree and variety of
inequality, have been tried in despotisms, monarchies, and
republics, and all alike have perished. In the panorama of the
past behold the mighty nations that have risen, one by one, but
to fall. Behold their temples, thrones, and pyramids, their
gorgeous palaces and stately monuments now crumbled all to dust.
Behold every monarch in Europe at this very hour trembling on his
throne. Behold the republics on this Western continent convulsed,
distracted, divided, the hosts scattered, the leaders fallen, the
scouts lost in the wilderness, the once inspired prophets blind
and dumb, while on all sides the cry is echoed, "Republicanism is
a failure," though that great principle of a government "by the
people, of the people, for the people," has never been tried.
Thus far, all nations have been built on caste and failed. Why,
in this hour of reconstruction, with the experience of
generations before us, make another experiment in the same
direction? If serfdom, peasantry, and slavery have shattered
kingdoms, deluged continents with blood, scattered republics like
dust before the wind, and rent our own Union asunder, what kind
of a government, think you, American statesmen, you can build,
with the mothers of the race crouching at your feet, while
iron-heeled peasants, serfs, and slaves, exalted by your hands,